BTB

BTB's Game Improvements - MAIN README

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1. MOD DESCRIPTION 2. TECHNICAL INFO 3. CONFLICTS & COMPATIBILITY 4. CREDITS & CLOSING

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. MOD DESCRIPTION

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The purpose of this mod is to radically change seve ral aspects of the game that I felt to be highly imbalanced: birthsigns, racial bonuses, skill progression rates, spell effects, and the premade spel ls. I've since expanded it to deal with alchemy ingredients, potions, equipment, enchantments, and other game settings, as well. The result is a game that's hopefully more rewarding due to a better sense of balance

and progression in addition to a much better sense of replayability due to the more pronounced effects that your initial choices of character selection should now have.

BTB's Game Improvements is largely based on the well-known "Wakim's Game Improvements" mod, as you might have guessed from the name. The alchemy module, in turn, was conceived as the spiritual successor to its direct counterpart in HotFusion's "Economy Adjuster" mod. Many of the changes made by this mod are either inspired by or taken dir ectly from the above-mentioned ones, and I thus prefer to think of my work as a continuation of what was started by Wakim and HotFusion - what started as a few tweaks to Wakim's Game Improvements quickly grew so large in scope that it evolved into what you see here.

Taking a hint from both Wakim's Game Improvements and Economy Adjuster (and about a few dozen other mods since), I've broken my mod up into five separate modules that can be used independently from one another so that players can choose which of my changes they want to use. Of course, just so you know, I'll be deeply offended and hurt if you don't use all of them. Really.

The five plugins that make up BTB's Game Improvements are:

 The "Character" plugin: edits the game's birthsig ns and races. It also includes a script that allows stat bonuses provided by birthsigns to extend beyond the 100-point limit.

 The "Spells" plugin: edits magic effects and pre-made spells, sets new starting spells, and adds several new NPC-only spells.

 The "Alchemy" plugin: edits the effects, values, and weights of alchemy ingredients and the pre-made potions, as well as renaming the pre-made potions to a more standardized format. It is one of the two modules that require both expansions.

 The "Equipment" plugin: reduces the value of the game 's most expensive items, adjusts the armor ratings on most of the game's armor for better balance amongst the three types, tweaks a few other settings for various pieces of equipment, and edits the enchantments on the majority of the game 's items, scrolls, artifacts, and unique/magical equipment. It also disables bartering with Creeper and the talking Mudcrabs. This is the other plugin that requires both expansions. ex pansions.

 The "Settings" plugin: edits game settings (GMSTs) and skill progression rates, as well as repair items and soul gems/paper. It also adds soul gems to some merchants and adds new guards.

All of the changes made by each plugin are listed in their respective "Changes" files, and that's pretty much all you really need to know here. If you'd like to know more about the reasoning or motivation behind the changes I've made, keep r eading. Otherwise, just go check out the changelogs.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"CHARACTER" PLUGIN:

Essentially the flagship module of my mod, the "Character" plugin is the one that sort of started it all by aiming to make all of the game's birthsigns actually useful, while also doing the same thing to the selection of races. The overall goal was to make character creation a process which has a much more lasting impact throughout the entire game r ather than a handful of minor bonuses and/or setbacks that won't really matter a few hours (or, in some cases, minutes) in to it. Inspired by such games as the original Final Fantasy, where vastly different experiences could be had depending on your decisions at the outset of the game, I set out to take the high replay value that comes along with such a concept and add that value to a game whose replay potential was already through the roof.

For birthsigns, my focus was largely on making them all not suck. It bothers me that most of the signs conveyed bonuses that would quickly be obsoleted, rendering only a few of them actually useful. One of  them - The Atronach - stood head and shoulders above all the others. The "drawback" of stunted magicka could easily be worked around by most players, and the defensive bonus that it conveyed was such that one could simply walk into Mordor at the outset of the game. So, using The Atronach as a benchmark of awesomeness, I set out to make all of the game 's signs useful and appealing.

My goal then became to allow each birthsign to conve y a bonus that remained useful throughout the entire game, but without being too overpowered. My first tool in this endeavor was a script provided by SpcetaclesOfDoom, dubbed "Level-Up Birthsign Remover". It is so named because it rem oves your birthsign just prior to leveling up and then adds it right back immediately thereafter, therefore allowing stat bonuses provided by birthsigns to carry over the 1 00-point limit. Even with this script, however, the

stat-boosting birthsigns don't become truly useful until you factor in the changes made by the other modules, which make it harder to abuse stat-boosting spells and potions (the "Spells" and "Alchemy" plugins) and tone down the insanely overpowered stat-boosting items (the "Equipment" plugin).

Taking an idea from Wakim, I also added stat boosts to The Lord, The Thief, The Warrior, and The Mage. Changing The Lady's endurance boost to willpower then provided us with a full se t of birthsign bonuses to every attribute. As a rather intere sting result of these changes in particular, the three "ruling" birthsigns (The Warrior, The Thief, and The Mage) now offer the sim plest, most straightforward bonuses. This is just one of many changes made by my mod that ended up being surprisingly loreappropriate.

All of the negative birthsign effects save the The Atronach's stunted magicka were removed, as I felt that birthsigns should be a bonus to your character, not a penalty. This change is very pronounced in several of the signs: The Lord, which is no longer g imped to the point of making you worse off for choosing it; The Apprentice, whose magicka boost was actually lowered to compensate; and The Serpent, whose barely-recognizeable Star-Curse now more closely resembles the Imperial Star of the West power.

Another sweeping change is that all of the spells provided by birthsigns (and also by races) have been converted into either powers or abilitie s. This helps to make their benefits more distinguished from the myriad of regular spells you'll encounter in the game, as well as allowing them to be more powerful since, in the case of powers, thei r usage is more limited. Blood Of The North and Star-Curse are both examples of spells that were made into much more potent powers, while Beggar's Nose is an example of  a spell that was deemed better suited as a permanent ability.

I also wanted to make other signs able to directly compete with The Atronach in terms of magic defense, hence the new Wizard's Brand power on The Apprentice and the 50-point reflection effect on Mara's Gift. On the physical defense side of things is The Shadow, which is the only sign that now actually becomes more powerful as the game progresses, due to the exponential nature of the unarmored skill. A GMST edit in the "Settings" plugin adds more punch to it by raising the unarmored skill's overall effectiveness, but I'll talk more about that when w e get to the sec tion for the "Settings" plugin.

Of them all, The Steed was probably the hardest sign to think of anything useful for, since there was little I could do to enhance its effects without straying into ridiculous territory - the addition of a feather ability eventually struck me as an appropriate compromise. A close second was The Tower, since I wanted to make the open effect more useful without raising the mag nitude or turning it into a spell. The

obvious solution at that point was to switch Tower Key to a fortify security effect. Again, the "Settings" plugin helps out by making raising your Security skill more useful than before.

For races, my aim was to make them all more distinct from each other. As with the birthsigns, I w anted each race to have at least some benefit that couldn't be replicated or r endered useless ten minutes into the game. Very few of the original racial abilities were useful enough to influence a player's decision, and the starting stats and skill bonuses were hardly noticeable at best (any deficiency could more than easily be overcome within the span of a few levels). Stats and bonuses were adjusted, racial abilities and powers were overhauled, and each race now has at least one power to call its own.

In addition to several new ones, every existing racial power has been modified to be in some way more useful than before - even the few that were toned down for being too overpowered. Voice of The Emperor got a 50-foot area of effect to compensate for the lowered magnitude, Adrenaline Rush gained two new boosts (willpower and acrobatics) to ease the m ag drop from 50 to 25, and Beserk got thorough overhaul since the agility drain combined with fortify fatigue effect made it more useful as a bartering tool (more on that later) than as a battle buff. Dragon Skin is also arguably less useful now, but only to dipshits who can't see how awesome four shields at once is (also, as was the case with The Shadow and The Tower, Dragon Skin becomes far mor e powerful via a GMST edit made i n the "Settings" plugin).

On the subject of actually making powers more powerful, I threw in a number of new effects to not only make them stronger, but also expensive e nough that you couldn't just custom-build an identical spell. Thunder Fist, for example, becomes BLINDingly more powerful, and Star of the West is now more absorbent than both Charmin and Brawny. I particularly like the added silence effect to Eye of Fear, which I feel makes it a far more versatile power than it was before. The addition of an ancestor ghost summon to Ancestor Guardian was mostly for shits and giggles, and the le ss said about Beast Tongue, the better.

In other aspects, however, I was far less creative. Large area effects seem to be what I resorted to when I couldn't think of anything better to jack up the cost, and most of the new powers appear to be heavily inspired by Adrenaline Rush (most noticeably Black Death and Arcane Ancestry). Arcane Ancestry, in particular, was the result of attempting to make Altmers more appealing versus Bretons and the magicka-boosting birthsigns, though it's been seriously toned down from its earlier incarnations that tended to allow things like God's Fire at level 1. Then there's Eye of Valenwood, which was originally called "Eye of Legolas" (it still is in the editor) - basically, author shorthand for "insert better name here later". The name stuck until complaints starting rolling in about "LotR in my Morrowind".

One side effect of these massively more powerful powers that I should probably mention here is how they relate to a recent feature of the Morrowind Code Patch that allows NPCs to use their racial powers in battle, where previously the AI was far too retarded for them to do so. Some advice: pass on that fix if  you're using this plugin. The reasons for this should be obvious enough, but if they aren't, they will be the moment you get your ass kicked five ways from Sunday by the first non-Wood Elf NPC you meet.

Also, as noted earlier, birthsigns and races no longer provide spells - they've all been converted into either powers or abilities. I bring this up now because there are two racial spells turned abilities worthy of particular note: Argonian Water Breathing and the Khajiit Eye of Night. Many players are of the belief  that a permanent water breathing effect will break a certain quest in the game. It doesn't. Regarding the latter, I've put an alternate version of the "Character" plugin that omits the Khajiit Eye of Ni ght edit inside the "extra stuff" folder for people who dislike the permanent night-eye look.

Resistances were also dealt with. Just as I did with powers, each race was made strong against at least something, the sole exception in this case being High Elves, who actually lose the only beneficial part of  their AIDS cocktail. I made it a goal to balance all of the weaknesses accordingly, so that no one element was more useful than the others. Lightning damage seemed to be the most universally effective, so Imperials got a 75% resistance to it that mirrors the fire resistance of that other race which makes up 90% of the NPCs you encounter. Khajiit now resist frost with those warm coats of theirs, and Orcs gain a small resistance to both fire and normal weapons to reinforce their role as a defensive race. Straight-up magicka resistance was left alone (save Wood Elves being given an immunity to paralysis in yet another attempt to make them no longer suck) since non-elemental damage is already balanced out by being more expensive to dish out. Ditto for poison, which was more or less in the same boat.

On a somewhat-related note, I stopped just short of turning the Redguard disease resistance into a disease weakness. This was mostly due to the fact that the "Settings" plugin doubles the chances of  catching disease, and I figured that anything beyond that would just be cruel. In retrospect, it was probably also a good call from a P.R. standpoint (not that I g ive two shits about being politically correct, but I get enough hate mail as is). I settled with just removing the disease resistance, which now exists in only two of the four races that originally had it (and it thus has more meaning now).

The combined starting stat totals for each race are now lower than before, with some attributes now starting as low as 20: enough to actually be a noticeable handicap. Aside from the obvious problem of  making it (more) difficult to join certain factions right off the damn boat, a value that low for just about any stat can be a huge pain i n the ass in its own right. Favore d stats or birthsigns can help to

compensate, of course, but at the cost of not overpowering another stat. To keep things simple, I set the same stats for both genders of each race and didn't edit the starting luck value for any of them.

To make up for for the lower overall stats, each race now has a full set of seven skill bonuses, all raised to 10 across the board (turning them up to 11, or any higher for that matter, would make it possible to start out with minor skills at higher levels than major ones). As much change as it may seem like, however, I still ended up remaining surprisingly faithful to the game's original settings.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"SPELLS" PLUGIN:

In short, almost none of the game's pre-made spells are auto-calculated anymore. All of them are now not only powerful enough to actually be useful, but tend to cost around 50%-80% of what they would have had you custom-made the same spell. While you'll still have to go that route to get your hands on the most powerful spells in the game (for the most part, anyway), at least the ones available for purchase now have a bigger draw than simply acquiring the effect for the purposes of spellmaking or enchanting.

The shift away from auto-calculation also has a second, less-obvious purpose. Certain NPCs (okay, most NPCs) have the ability to cast any spell that's flagg ed as "auto-calculate", which in the default rules is pretty much all of them. Thus, as a direct r esult of providing better spells for the playe r to use, I've also gotten rid of the shitty spells that auto-calculated NPCs were actually supposed to use.

Confused? Under the default rules, thanks to nearly eve rything being auto-calculated, both the player and most NPCs had access to just about the exact same pool of worthless pre-made pells - the ones that weren't underpowered enough to be shitty were overpowered enough to be impossible to cast. By removing the auto-calculation from these spells in order to make them more useful to the player, I 've also removed them as random spells to be cast by random NPCs. NPCs can still cast any spell that's been speficially assigned to them, auto-calculated or not, but most just aren't given any.

In response to this, taking yet another idea from Wakim, I've created a few dozen new auto-calculated, NPC-only spells. They span every school of magicka (except Conjuration, since most of its spells are

actually still auto-calculated) and range in cost from 15 mag icka to 60. Technically, several of these "new" spells are just existing spells that aren't available to the player, though I've also gone and edited quite a few non auto-calculated spells used by certain cre atures (but not the player), as well. The line that separates old from new is rather blurry, and actually quite irrelevant - all you really need to know is that enemy spells have received the exact same treatment as yours.

Make no mistake: there is a significant difficulty factor at play here. The new/edited NPC-only spells are of a much higher caliber than what you're probably used to having thrown at you, and every one of your brand new roster of kick-ass spells is a kick-ass spell that at least one NPC knows. Thus, with the great power of spells that no longer suck will come the responsibility of learning how to use them effectively in battle, lest we end up cleaning a very nasty stain off of the wall that used to be you.

Of course, all of this doesn't necessarily mean that every peasant and two-bit thug will be busting out with God's Spark on your ass. Since the "always succee ds" flag is unchecked for every spell that I've edited, NPCs will only use spells that they have both sufficient magicka and a reasonable enough skill level to cast. In most cases, it's going to be that second requirem ent which keeps your enemies in check. However, now may be a good time to mention that the "Settings" plugin increases the amount of  magicka available to all NPCs, which will have a rather obvious impact on their ability to use their shiny new toys. Also, the improved damage/drain magicka spells in this plugin were made assuming the changes made by the "Settings" plugin, and so will probably seem a tad bit overkillish without it.

On a sort of flip-side to the edits I make to existing NPC-only spells, this plugin also edits several unused spells and makes them available to the player. And it does so the only way I know how: by giving them to various spell merchants to sell. I trie d my best to pick ones that nobody would ever want to edit, thus avoiding conflicts with other mods, but you never know. So, I've listed all of the NPCs edited by this plugin in the "conflicts & compatibility" section at the bottom of this readme as a handy reference just in case somebody else gets the same bright idea that I did and uses Random Joe Blow (note: not an actual NPC) as a point of insertion for their edits.

One special case that bears a quick explanation before moving on is what I did with the Shockball and Greater Shockball spells. Both are identical in the default rules due to Shockball obviously mistakenly being given the same settings as its more powerful counterpart. But since just regular Shockball is the one that all of the big baddies have, I didn't want to nerf them by weak ening it. So, I swapped their names and lowered the effectiveness of Greater Shockball, instead. As noted in the changelog, this directly contradicts the Morrowind Patch Project, which just weakens the regular Shockball spell.

The cost of spell effects has also been changed pre tty much across the board. Underused effects are now much cheaper, while some of the more abused ones have been royally jacked up to prevent cheese abuse. In extreme cases (chameleon, fortify attribute, etc.), enchanting and/or spellmaking privileges have been revoked. The removal of auto-calculation helps to enforce these changes by allowing me to provide the player with reasonably priced spells that are useful without being overpowered, while at the same time making overpowering them on your own much more difficult (or, in same cases, impossible).

Restore attribute will probably seem to most like the harshest of my changes, since the effect cost has been jacked up to a comparativel y pricey 1:1 cost to magnitude ratio. This was specifically to do away with players making one of those spells that restores al l attributes by a few points for only one or two magicka, rendering the entire effect next to meaningless. I made the pre-made spells cheaper to compensate for this, doing my best to hit that "sweet spot" where they're useful enough that you'll actually use them, yet anyone but an experienced restorationist will probably reach for a potion first.

Slowfall may also seem ludicrously overpriced at first until you remember that it's just as effective at a magnitude of one as it is above it, thus rendering the 30-point magnitude of the pre-made spell entirel y meaningless. The drain health/fatigue/magicka/attribute spells are also very good examples of whoever having made them clearly not being aware of how they actually work, given that both the spells and effect costs appear to suggest that the magnitude is cumulative over time. And as I'm sure we're all aware by now, it isn't. In order for drain fatigue or magicka to be of any use at all, I had to raise the spell magnitudes drastically and tank the effect costs. So I did.

Drain health, however, was actually already quite useful - too useful, in fact. What made it unique amongst the drain effects is that it was the only one that could be truly effective at a duration of one (as a sufficient magnitude would still prove lethal), thus allowing very effe ctive custom creations that cost next to nothing to cast - especial ly if the effect cost was set to match its intended use. There was nothing I could do to make drain health anything other than a cheaper, always-preferable alternative to damage health, so I edited the pre-made spells to reflect how the effect is supposed to work and then barred it from custom spells and enchantments. I went ahead and lowered the effect cost, as well, so that it would work as originally intended in potions.

Fortify health, on the other hand, was perhaps the mo st special case of all, again because of how shittily it's hardcoded to work in the game . While the Morrowind Code Patch fixes it to not actually make you worse off for using it, it's still an e ffect that essentially just gives you health and then takes it right back away. For it to be of any use at all, I have scripted the three pre-made fortify health spell s to prevent the

loss of current health when the effect wears off, thus allowing them to actually give you health (with a higher spell cost than a comparable restore health spell for balance).

The function of the script is simple: when a fortify health spell ends and takes away your maximum and current health, the script adds the current health back. The problem comes if your health falls below the magnitude of the fortify health spell - under normal circumstances, you would die from the effect ending even if the health was added back a split se cond later. So, my script also checks to see if your character is in the "danger zone" and, if so, gives some (or all) of the health back early. This extra health isn't technically accurate - it's merely "borrowed" health to counteract the health loss that will occur when the spell ends. Furthermore, to avoid this "borrowe d" health allowing players to stay alive beyond the point that they should have died, the script kill s you if you enter the danger zone ag ain after all of  the "borrowed" health has been given. Functionally, it is completely fair and works as described in the above paragraph. The flaw is that the "borrowed" health is health that shouldn't be there , which will likely make you think that you have more than you really do.

Another technical problem with my script is that it turns fortify health spells into "one shot" effects that for all practical purposes end when you sustain damage equal to your normal maximum health, as you will be treated by the script at that point as if your maximum health has returned to normal. I still say that this is preferable to the spell ending when your health is too low and you die for no apparent reason, but the point is quite arguable. Then again, if you don't like the way I handle fortify health spells,  just shut up and go make your own. With blackjack. And hookers. In fact, forget the spells.

Open was a real tough nut to deal with, as well. This is because open spells are extremely susceptible to save scumming (saving and continually reloading until the desired outcome is achieved). The default effect cost allowed for a 100-point open spell (essentially a skeleton key) at mere 30 magicka to cast, so a little patience would easily get you just about anywhere. But I knew that if I made the effect cost too expensive, it would just either encourage this type of behavior even more or cause players to simply defect to security, instead. I eventually settled of tripling the effect cost and introducing a wide r array of  progressively more effective pre-made spells. The magnitudes are variable, but hopefully of a narrow enough range to avoid at least a greater amount of reload abuse than with lockpicking.

And then there was bound equipment: a beast that managed to somehow combine being insanely underpriced with several different effects of wildly varying usefulness all having the same spell cost. Why anybody at Bethesda saw fit for a set of bound boots to cost just as much to conjure up as a bound cuirass or a bound battle-axe of painful doom, I'll never know. I'm guessing that somebody in quality control just really wanted to get the hell out of the office one Friday afternoon.

Silence had its effect cost lowered greatly to help it compare more favorably to both the sound effect and the clearly-superior paralyze. The paralyze spells were set to be balanced versus other similar effects, such as burden and drain/damage attribute, while the cost of the effect itself has been tanked in order to balance it out as an alchemy effect. I then disabled it as an effect from custom spells and enchantments because the assholes who made this game didn't give us a way to edit alchemy effect costs independently from spells and enchantments. Other effects to suffer the same fate as paralyze (and for the same reason) were dispel, drain fatigue, invisibility, and poison.

I should probably also explain all of the other cases where spellmaking/enchanting is now disallowed:

 Absorb magicka is off-limits for enchanting for the same reason that restore magicka always was.

 Chameleon was for reasons that should be painfully obvious to anyone who's ever played this game before. Constant effect cheese aside, this is one of the most easily exploitable and broken effects in the game, particularly for players wishing to steal shit without the pesky side effect of being caught.

 Charm was so as to not completely replace the need for personality and speechcraft. It's also one of  those effects, like most of ones listed here, that's really hard to enforce with a high cost, since you can  just minimize the duration on custom builds to crank up the magnitude. Both pre-made spells with this effect were given set magnitudes rather than variable ones because, as I discussed with the open e ffect above, these are the sort of spells that would otherwise invite heavy save/reload abuse.

 Command humanoid was because the ability to screw with just about any NPC in the game was incredibly game-breaking, to say the absolute least. The pre-made spells remain effective against slaves, however, which is the one thing that they were legitimately useful for.

 Cure paralyzation has been removed entirely. It was pointless as a spell effect to begin with since you can't cast spells or use enchanted items when y ou're paralyzed, so I retooled Fre e Action into a resist paralysis spell, instead. The cure paralyzation effect is only actually useful in the form of a potion (which curiously can be consumed while paralyzed), which in turn has the polarizing effect of rendering all resist paralysis effects useless. This is why the "Alchemy" plugin also does away with cure paralyzation altogether and compensates for it by making the resist effect easier to come by.

 Drain health, as discussed above, basically just becomes a cheaper version of damage health when it gets used in any kind of a custom build, and it becomes downright evil if the effect cost is lowered to reflect its actual purpose. In addition to removal of spellmaking/enchanting privileges, the effect cost has been lowered so that it will function as intended in potions.

 Drain skill was more for the effe ct it could have on you than on your opponents, but I can imagine variants that I'd consider whipping out on your enemies to be horribly cheap.

 Damage and fortify skill shouldn't even appear in the game in the first place, and I'm still not sure why I went to the trouble of revoking their spellmaking/enchanting privleges.

 Damage and drain attribute were for intelligence abuse issues (for those who don't know, they could be used to completely recharge your magicka).

 Fortify attribute was entirely because of fortify intelligence, which is by far the single biggest exploit in the game (and that's saying a lot), though fortify luck also has abuse potential, as well.

 Fortify fatigue was in pretty much the same camp as drain health and charm, given that things like lockpicking and mercantile are affected by fatigue, and there was no other way to stop players from cheesing 1-second builds with insane magnitudes to abuse that fact like a set of perky nipples.

 Fortify magicka, like cure paralyzation, has been removed from spells completely due to abuse issues similar those with damage/drain attribute. Barring the effect from spellmaking/enchanting was somewhat extraneous (also as with cure paralyzation) and done more for consistency's sake than anything else.

 Levitate had an abuse problem in that it could be used as an offensive effect, notably eg regious in that the lower the magnitude, the more debilitating it was. And also, let's not forget how easy it is to abuse Levitation "on self" when faced with very stupid opponents with no ranged attacks.

 Lock is off-limits for spellmaking for the technical reason that it's pointless to make a lock spell once you already know one. My ulterior motive is to prevent players from creating one-point magnitude lock spells in order to make raising their security skill even easier than with the pre-made spells. Enchanting privleges remain (albeit with a higher effect cost) due to the much heavier restrictions placed on the enchanting system as a whole by the "Settings" plugin.

 Soul trap was to prevent the abuse of multiple soul trap effects to capture multiple souls from the same creature. See my commentary for the "Equipment" plugin for more information, as well as how I've dealt with the same issue there.

 Telekinesis, like chameleon, was entirely because of how easy it made stealing, even without a decent sneak skill. The Telekinesis spell was nerfed to hell to match. Note that it will remain useful versus traps, regardless of magnitude, as you need only be out of normal activation range to avoid them.

 Weakness to fire, frost, shock, poison, and magicka were because they could be put into custom spells or enchantments at a 1-second duration along with the appropriate damage effect to greatly inflate the magnitude at a fraction of the increase in spell cost, and raising the effect costs would simply render them pointless to begin with. The spells have been made more effective both to compensate, as well as to help make the Destruction skill (which is by far the school of magicka most prone to being displaced entirely by enchanted items) more worth investing in.

And finally, there's new starting spells. Unbeknownst to many (but knownst to me), the default rules actually specify two starting spells for each school of magicka. Three of them are just so ludicrously expensive that no starting player can possibly ever cast them, and the game is coded not to start you out with spells that even most level 20 characters have no hope of pulling off. New starting spells have been set that are much more reasonable for a first-level player: nothing costs over 9 magicka to cast, and they all should be useful spells for somebody who's just starting out.

Even if you take a minor and miss out on the starters, though, Arrille has you covered by now selling a wider assortment of newbie-friendly spells for each school of magicka. This is of particular importance if  you're using a mod like Service Requirements that makes most of the game's spell merchants refuse service to you until you've advanced sufficiently through whatever faction they belong to. And without access to any cheap spells to practice your magic skills with, good luck with that.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"ALCHEMY" PLUGIN:

As I stated earlier, my alchemy changes were all largely inspired by HotFusion's Economy Adjuster mod. HotFusion took issue to the somewhat random values of alchemy ing redients and underwent a painstaking process of giving them all new values based on rarity and difficulty of collection, the most prominent result being that animal-based ingredients became more valuable and that killing things for their body parts could now actually be a (sort of) profit able venture. A third factor - actual usefulness of  the ingredient - was noticeably ignored. Plus, there were a few other things he missed. Still, HotFusion's formulas provided me an with excellent base upon which to start my own work.

The first concept that my alchemy overhaul takes from HotFusion's mod is the separation of plant and animal-based ingredients, which acknowledges the effort of finding and killing things versus murdering a poor, defenseless saltrice plant. All plant-based ingredients have been assigned a value, based on a combination of their rarity and usefulness, of 1, 2, 5, 10, or 15. Animal-based ingredients, on the other hand, start at 15 and go up fr om there. These values are, for t he most part, far more generous than HotFusion's, and aim to make killing shit a much more re warding experience than before.

I've also lowered the weight of several ingredients that seemed far too heavy for the often-meager benefits they provided. In this case, an ingredient's "benefits" refers to both its effects and its resale value, which is why animal meat and hides still weigh more on average. Even taking value into consideration, however, you should now rarely find yourself consuming or selling ingredients solely because they're too heavy to be worth lugging around.

But by far my biggest complaint of all was the halfassed distribution of effects among the ingredients in general. A large portion of them made absolutely no sense, existing seemingly only to take up space. Not even counting the ones that only appeared in a si ngle ingredient (or in two ingredients that should never be combined in the first place), negative effects showed up so rarely in potions that one has wonder why they were even put there to begin with. Several of the "negative" effects weren't even very negative, regardless. Drain personality on a fortify agility/frost shield potion? Yeah, that's really going to put a damper in your plans. What, were you going to ask that frost atronach out on a date?

Positive effects had their own problems. Since, as we've already established, negative effects were almost never an issue under the default rules, the only thing that ever stopped you from brewing up whatever badassery you damn well pleased was difficulty finding the required ingredients. Given that the positive effects also appeared be assigned totally at random, the results were somewhat varied. It's the sort of nonsense that made restore speed potions harder to come by than a three-legged midget, while game-breaking fortify intelligence potions were practically growing out of your ass.

The ingredients added by Tribunal were a very obvious attempt to address several effects that the devs "forgot" to make more abundant in the original gam e, and they didn't do a particularly good job of it. Bloodmoon's ingredients were just totally fucking out there. The boys at Bethesda were clearly out of  ideas by that point, and it showed. The only explanation I can think of for at least half the effects in Solthsheim ingredients is that they're there for "flavor", except in this case the flavor is ass.

And so, I've completely overhauled ingredient effects across the board. Positive effects are now more evenly distributed, both in general and between common and rare ingredients (depending on the effect). Negative effects have been set so that they will appear far more frequently in potions, and wil l be more appropriately negative towards the desired positive effect. Every ingredient now has only either two or three positive effects, and for every positive effect will have at least one negative effect that will be shared with at least one other ingredient carrying the same positive effect. In general, higher quality ingredients will result in potions with no (or less severe) neg ative side effects.

Better ingredients will also be the ones that tend to possess one or more "t op-tier" positive effects, like spell absoprtion or reflect. Lower, or "shit-tier" effects like feather or detect key have absolutely no business on ingredients like rubies and diamonds, and thus have been replaced with awesomer effects more befitting of such precious rarities. The incentive to actually keep expensive ingredients like diamonds around instead of selling them then becomes that they will be the ones necessary to brew "mega" potions with multiple top-tier positive effects (and fewer to no downsides).

Regarding effect tiers, it should be noted that fortify magicka received a promotion in my changes. This is because, like I discussed in my commentary for the "Spells" plugin, a bit of saving/reloading is all it really takes for a truly determined player to cast any spell that s/he has the available magicka to cast, regardless of actual skill level. Thus, the player's available pool of magicka is the only real "hard" limit in the game as far as what you're able to cast goes, and so I felt it highly inappropriate that the effect was originally present on two of the most common ingredients in the game.

Amazingly, I ended up remaining almost completely faithful to the original settings throughout all of this madness. Despite removing several effects entirely and adding a few new ones, almost none of the other (positive) ones changed much, if at all. Most of my edits (not counting to Tribunal and Bloodmoon ingredients, which as we've already discussed were totally fucked) were to negative effects, which most players probably never paid any attention to, anyway. My changes to positive effects, conversely, were mostly to ingredients for which they were rarely ever used, like restore health on Corpus Weepings.

In fact, several of my changes are rather quite lore-friendly. For example, the poison effect now shows up in several more ingredients than before, and it does so almost exclusively in alteration-related ingredients found in or near the Bitter Coast, thus giving a significant and surprisingly appropriate advantage to Argonians in this regard. I t's one thing to give a skill bonus to certain races, but quite another to make them actually better able to utilize the skill in question by allowing them to gain benefits from a wider variety of ingredients than the other races. Another example is paralyze, which is now the single most common effect in ingredie nts. This provides, at long last, an actual compelling reason to play a Wood Elf, provided that you're also using the "Character" plugin to give them immunity and the "Spells" plugin to make paralyze an actually noticeable effect in potions.

This brings us to yet another point: even though BTB's Game Improvements is a modular mod (shut up), it's unavoidable that the plugins all tend to be interdependent to at least some extent. That fact is perhaps the most true for this module, which tends to rely not only on the changes made by the other plugins in order to feel truly complete. For example, the magic effect cost edits made by the "Spells" plugin will allow a number of previously worthless effects (feather, swift swim, etc.) to become actually useful. Conversely, it also lowers the effect costs of drain health, drain fatigue, and the abovementioned paralyze so that they will as devastating as they were originally intended to be.

Another important example of inter-mod relations is the two-pronged attack on the overeffectiveness of  the alchemy skill overall by this and the "Settings" plugin. Here , the values of all alchemy apparati have been balanced to encourage the player to gradually move up to better equipment over time rather than  just saving up for the top-tier shit right off the bat. More importantly, it lowers the qualitie s of the best apparati, thus narrowing the overall range of al chemy effects and allowing me to make my adjustments more globally rather than base them mostly on preventing criminally powerful potions from anyone who manages to snag a full set of Grandmaster's equipment - which just ends up screwing over the alchemist who's just getting started more than anything. The global alchemy changes I speak of, then, are made by the "Settings" plugin, which I'll discuss in further detail when we get to that section.

The interdependence of these modules works both ways, however. A lot of edits made by the other plugins also count on the changes made here to finish the job, particularly the "Spells" plugin with regards to the game's heavily-abused spell effects. Many spell effect costs were only unuseably high to begin with purely because of how badly they could be abused in potions, and so bringing them back into play will create a bit of a rift unless something stops the mad alchemists of the world from brewing up a potion of reflection so powerful that it hurls the Earth into the sun and we all die in fl ames. The "Alchemy" plugin also completes what its partner in crime started by nixing some of the game's most damning and blatant exploits - most notably the infamous fortify intelligence potion, which could pump your stats up to numbers that don't even exist.

In fact, now would probably be a good time to discuss the effects that have been rem oved from and added to the wild world of alchemy and alchemy accessorie s. The new effects are: sanctuary, shield, slowfall, and jump. The latter two already showed up in the pre-made potions, so it seemed odd that you couldn't make them yourself. Jump also helps by giving you something to do with Bungler's Bane and Hypha Facia (both of to which it's been added) aside from se lling them to Arrille for little m ore than a few drakes and his eternal scorn. Sanctuary and Shield just seemed like good effects to have around, especially in the early parts of the game when everything can kick your ass - though the former is subject to a fair bit of needing the e dits from the "Spells" and "Settings" plugins to keep it from g etting out of  hand.

And then there's the effects I've removed, along with my justifications for each of them:

 Cure paralyzation, which as I said earlier renders the resist effect useless (namely in potions, which can be consumed even while paralyzed). All instances have been replaced with resist paralysis.

 Light, because it's infinitely inferior to night-eye (as well as completely worthless in most cases). Both instances have been replaced with night-eye.

 Telekinesis, as I've already explained, was far too exploitable for the purposes of stealing shit. All instances have been replaced with sanctuary (which is itself quite exploitable, as I mentioned above, unless you're also using the "Spells" plugin to jack up the effect cost and the "Settings" plugin to deal with the overeffectiveness of potions in general).

 Fortify intelligence, which, as I've mentioned several times already, is the game's number one biggest exploit. This is because higher intelligence affects the strength of all potions that you create, and the effects of potions can be stacked.

 Fortify luck, because it has more or less the same exploitability issues as fortify intelligence does (it also affects the strength of potions, FYI), just to a lesser extent.

 Fortify fatigue, again for abuse issues that were already discussed along with the "Spells" plugin. Although you aren't able to sacrifice duration for a higher magnitude with potions - the main concern that I had for it with spellmaking/enchanting, you can still stack them (see above) to similar effe ct.

 Drain intelligence, yet again for abuse issues I've already discussed back with "Spells" plugin.

 Drain personality, since it was the only "drain" effect that added no actual downside to a potion (unless you were planning on getting freaky with Almalexia or something... can't say I'd blame you).

 Drain endurance, as it's basically the same as drain fatigue, but less effective due to its higher effect cost (assuming use of the "Spells" plugin, of course). Although a retroactive health mod will cause it to also lower your maximum health, it remains far inferior to drain health, which instead lowers your current health.

 Drain magicka, due to it being the only one of the actually unpleasant negative ingredient effects that was only harmful specifically to mage-type characters. For ingredie nts on which I wanted effects that negatively impacted a player's spellcasting abilities, I went with drain willpower or drain luck instead, as both of those also have a negative effect on non-magical combat abilities.

 Weakness to fire and frost damage, both of which appeared exclusively in Bloodmoon ingredients and not nearly enough of them to cause you any problems. For damage-related negative effects, I've stuck with drain health and poison.

 Vampirism, drain alteration, damage intelligence, damage magicka, fortify maximum magicka, and recall all appeared only once, and thus would never actually show up in any potion. Not to mention that most of them were pretty re tarded effects to begin with. Quality control? What's what?

I left all of the unique ingre dients (i.e. Poison, Meteor Slime, etc.) alone, since I didn't want to bot her with them. The "cursed" ingredient variants are also unedited - this is because the Morrowind Patch Project (which you should be using) scripts all cursed ingredients to be replaced with their normal versions as soon as you pick them up, thus making e diting the cursed variants rather pointless. It does have a somewhat-unintended side effect of making cursed ingredients easier to identify due to their different effects/values, however, though they're pretty hard not to notice either way.

In addition to the addition/removal/changing of various effects, all ingredients have had positive effects set as the primary, the intent being that consuming them directly - as opposed to just making them into potions - should at least convey some sort of benefit. This notion is also reinforced somewhat by the "Settings" plugin, which lowers the experience gain to the Alchemy skill per potion creation from 2.00 to 1.00, while in turn raising the gain for e ating ingredients raw from 0.50 to 0.60.

Because it's difficult to fully grasp the full range of changes made to the game's network of alchemy ingredients simply by looking at the changelist, I've thrown together a handy reference guide in the form of an .html file named "Ingredient Effects", and placed i t in the "extra stuff" folder. I tri ed to make it as user-friendly to navigate as possible, but I've found that it tends to l ook kind of retarded if it's viewe d in a retarded browser. The solution, obviously, is to not use r etarded browsers.

This module now also edits the game's pre-made potions in a manner consistent with the changes made by the "Spells" plugin, which is to say that it takes the pre-made potions, most of which are completely useless, and makes them no longer useless. The default rules set a standard magnitude and duration for most potions, which logically would have resulted in wildly different results depending on the effect. But since the standard values were so low, especially for the cheaper potions, the results were often pretty much the same: totally fucking worthless. Thus, the first step of my overhaul was to create a new set of  standard magnitudes/durations that would make the stuff actually worth carrying around.

Since all potions work "on self", quite a few of them got kicked off the worthwhile train right off the bat because their effects were negative. It also seemed weird to me that some of the other potions were missing either certain variants, or just had no variants at all. Then there were the spoiled potions, which  just made no sense whatsoever. Because I really didn't want to get into making new potions or fucking

around with the leveled lists, I did a bit of creative rearranging by converting potions with negative effects into positive ones, creating several whole new lines of potions and filling in gaps in the others where necessary. I went ahead and got rid of the chameleon, cure paralyzation, fortify luck, and fortify intelligence potions in the process - I trust I shouldn't have to explain why by this point.

While I was editing the effects (and values) of potions, I went ahead and dealt with their pointlessly long names, as well. The Morrowind Patch Project already sort of s tarted this by renaming the potions whose names differed from the format of other potions in the same line ("Quality Potion of Fortify Speed" vs. "Exclusive Fortify Speed", for example), but for some reason just didn't finish the job by applying the same format globally, thus leaving several whole lines of potions with excessively long and/or pretentious handles (I always imagined that Rising Force potions just summoned Yngwie Malmsteen instead of anything Morrowind-related). The naming schema is now simply "(Quality) + (Effect)", where "quality" is one of the following: Bargain, Cheap, Standard, Quality, or Exclusive.

The potion-like liquors have also been addressed and given a somewhat more standard format, as well. Their formula seemed simple enough: they act like normal fortify attribute potions, except that they're cheaper, easier to come by, generally more effective, and come with negative side effects - except that some liquors (Flin, for example) didn't follow this format. And then there was the pesky issue of drain intelligence not really being a negative effect since it can be abused to hell and back. I've reworked them all to be of more hopefully appropriate use, particularly to the beginning player. This included reducing the price of the mid-range liquors (Greef and Sujamma) to make them all cheap enough t o easily get your hands on early on, as well as reducing their weights enough to make you want to do so.

The issue of restore magicka potions in particular and t heir relative scarcity does deserve a bit of special mention here. The effect is very hard to come by in the default gam e, and I intended to uphold the notion behind that fact as much as possible as I went about finding various ways to ease up on it. For example, there weren't nearly enough spoiled potions for me to assign one as a variant to e very line of  them, nor did I particularly care to create more. So, I set them all to restore magicka along with the much heftier downside of damaging (not draining) one of your attributes. Skooma, with its newfound willpower boost, now completely tanks your intelligence to prevent you from using a Skooma high as an excuse to cast spells way beyond your means, but there is a nice (and intentional) side effect of fully restoring your magicka once you come down from it. Drugs are good, m'kay?

Also on the subject of magicka restoration is Comberries, which have had their restore magicka effect set as the primary per my reasoning given above. This makes them a very useful way to restore small amounts of magicka on the go without making the actual potions easier to come by. The effect has been

added to a few more rare ingredients, but I felt it important for game balance that it remain present on only one common ingredient (Bloodmoon notwithstanding), thus requiring at least one rare one to create a potion. Besides, I would assume that anyone who thinks that a virtually endless supply of  magicka isn't imbalancing would already be implementing some sort of magicka regen mod, thus making this change of little consequence to the g ame (which I do believe I've just lost).

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"EQUIPMENT" PLUGIN:

There are two main sets of changes that the "Equipment" plugin makes, and both aim for the same goal. In most RPGs, a sense of progression and accomplishment is gained from gradually moving to more and more powerful equipment as you can find and/or afford it. In Morrowind, a sense of pointlessness and emptiness comes from skipping right past all the low-level shit and going straight for the best stuff, all the while selling off your piles of spares for top dollar. Clearly, something needed to be done.

My first set of changes to the game's equipment address an issue with the economy that no other mod to my knowledge ever has. It disturbs me that with the prevalence of economy-adjusting mods out there, nobody has ever seen fit to deal with what I see as the legitimate source of the problem: ludicrously overvalued equipment. While several mods do try to make things like Dae dric and Ebony anything more difficult to come by, can I re ally be the only one who found it odd that you still ended up swimming in stuff that was worth several thousand times more m oney than anybody ever had to pay you for it?

I've adjusted the values of the most expensive stuff in the game to be more reasonable. In this case, "reasonable" means drastically reducing their values until they're no longer beyond the realm of any monetary transaction you can possibly make. To wit, most rare and/or unique items are now worth between 2,000 and 10,000 gold, with o nly the rarest of the rare priced beyond that. While selling stuff is still a great (if not the best) way to make money, you no longer can trade in a single dai-katana for a merchant's entire inventory just so that you can come even remotely close to getting your money's worth.

Glass equipment was a tough creature to handle in this respect, as it's the rarest and more or less the most powerful equipment in the game that's also available for purchase. The value was lowered, but not

so much that you could so easily buy it. Beyond that, I felt that its disadvantages needed to be much more disadvantageous to balance out not only glass equipment in general, but also what was easily the most powerful armor class (light armor) in the game.

The first thing I did was played up the inherent fragility of glass by greatly lowering its durability. I tried to not be too extreme with this, but I'm sure that any of you who have ever heard of the SaGa series might be familiar with a certain glass sword that de alt insane amounts of damage, but also had an unfortunate tendency to break after a sing le use. It was a great idea then, and it still is today. This change, I feel, makes at least glass weapons much more balanced against other options, especially given how easy they are to find. Glass armor, on the other hand, still needed a bit more nerfing.

Because glass armor is (arguably) the best armor in the game, there are those who feel that the health reduction alone is too harsh due to how less able i t becomes to withstand the game's toughest ba ttles. However, it actually makes quite a bit of sense if you think it through. A warrior-type character using light armor would be likely to maintain a high skill in Armorer, and thus would be able to keep glass equipment in shape. A mage-type character would be likely to supplement their defenses with a high unarmored skill and/or bound armor. A stealth-type character, finally, would be most likely to rely on skills that help to avoid getting hit in the first place (that and the fact that nobody ever actually plays stealth-type characters in Morrowind).

Also note that even with the reduction, there's still a noticeably large gap in durability between glass armor and every other piece of light armor in the game. Even larger and more noticeable was the defensive gap, which ultimately contributed more than anything to medium armor's massive inferiority complex. I nerfed the defense rating of glass armor from 50 to 40, and on top of that made most of the best medium armor a little bit better at what it does. I also addressed the rather large gap in the heavy armor ratings with a bit of tweaking and filled in the rest of the holes by making the assorted wolf and bear armor from Bloodmoon actually worth the trouble to acquire. Light armor is still probably the best choice overall, but at least now not ridiculously so.

That brings us to the other half of this module's changes, w hich are concerned with just how easy i t is to get your hands on ridiculously overpowered (and also ridiculously underpowered) equipment. Just as the "Spells" plugin put the clamp on everything that could be abused like a redheaded stepchild and then did everything in its power to make everything left over not suck like a Brazilian prostitute on shore leave, so does the "Equipment" plugin with the enchantments on the vast majority of the game's magical/unique equipment and artifacts. Also, scrolls. Because they're sort of like equipment.

Before we begin, let me reiterate the "just how easy it is" portion of the above paragraph. Of all the nerfs made by this plugin, the harshest of them we nt to items that could be found relativel y early on in the game, and with little to no effort if you knew where to look, whereas items from Tribunal and Bloodmoon have retained much more of their power (though, to be technical, they sorta also lost more). Keening, Sunder, and Wraithguard, notably, have all remained quite powerful when compared to the rest of the game's equipment. For best results, combine my mod with one such as Darknut's Greater Dwemer Ruins, which makes the final portions of the game's main quest appropriately more difficult.

Right off the bat, the Ebony Arrows of Slaying and Black Hands Dagger deserve very special mentions. The latter can possibly be attributed to the fact that whoever made it just didn't understand how the absorb health effect works, because we've already established that at least somebody involved with the game design (probably the same dude, actually) had no clue how any of the drain effects work, either. As for the Ebony Arrows of Slaying, I 'm at a total loss. Typo, maybe? Perhaps somebody meant to type out "100" and instead accidentally ended up with "5000". Those keys are like, right next to each other.

It's also important to note how my enchantment edits relate to the changes made by both the "Spells" and "Alchemy" plugins. Both removed access to a number of highly-abuseable effects in their respective fields, and it's now up to the "Equipment" plugin to finish the work they started by dealing the final blows to these quality control rejects and finishing them off for good. While I haven't really removed any effects here entirely, since even the game's most broken effects can have at least some legitimate use when paired with appropriately rare equipment, there's been a considerable amount of nerfing to the list of usual suspects: charm, chameleon, fortify (anything), and especially telekinesis (remember that the most legitimate use of telekinesis - disarming traps - still works even at a pisspoor magnitude).

Unlike the "Spells" plugin, just about every enchantment has been set to auto-calculate in this module. This was done more for simplicity's sake than anything, since the few e nchantments that weren't already set to autocalc to begin w ith were being deliberately fucked in the charge department to compensate for being way too overpowered (Vampiric Ring, Ring of Equity, etc.). And seeing as how that's no longer an issue, I saw nothing wrong with autocalculating across the board.

Another thing that I talked about earlier along with the "Spells" plugin that should be brought up here is that that the "Settings" plugin increases the am ount of magicka avilable to all NPCs. As with the changes made by the "Spells" plugin, any of the enchantments I've edited here that deal with damaging or draining magicka are assuming those new values, and so will probably come off as a bit overpowered to anybody who isn't also using the "Settings" plugin alongside this one. Additionally, the changes made by the "Settings" plugin to the enchant system as a whole tie in very closely with the edits made by this

plugin to all of the game's pre-set enchantments, namely in that a lot of the game's equipment becomes far more desirable due to the difficulty (or outright inability) of duplicating their effects.

The fortify health effect, which required a specialized scri pt in the "Spells" plugin to make it of any use at all, is treated a bit differently here. This is because scripts are able to determine active spell effects on a player, but not active enchantments, thus forcing me to take a different approach. So, I ammended all non-constant effect fortify health enchantments with a drain health effect of equal magnitude that would act as a delayed restore health effect to counteract the loss of current health just before the fortify health effect wears off, coupled with an immediate restore health effect to counter the initial drain health loss. The reason that I didn't just do the same thing with the spells is that it would have placed a destruction effect into what should be purely restoration spell(s).

Soul trap is a special case, as well, as I also mentioned earlier when discussing the "Spells" plugin. The changes I've made to it here are entirely to prevent the abuse of multiple soul trap effects to capture multiple souls from the same target. This meant augmenting all soul trap enchantments with a 100point dispel effect to remove any existing soul trap e ffects (which also had the nice side effect of m aking soul trap enchantments a bit more versatile) and by sh ortening the duration of the soul trap effect to 1 second so that you have no time to follow up by castin g the titular spell. This does add a certain degr ee of strategy to trapping souls, as any enchanted item us ed to such effect must deal the k illing blow in order to work. A 1-second drain health effect was added to the enchantments on items that were otherwise harmless (the Amulet of Gem-Feeding, for example) so that this would be possible.

Special attention was also given to constant effect e nchantments, which are in and of themselve s rather unbalancing (as I'll talk about more when we get to the "Settings" plugin). They become egregiously so when you consider how powerful most of the ones in the game are - any negative effects they might carry to present an illusion of balance are m oot as temporary magicka resistance can offset them permanently. Not counting everything I've already mentioned just above, the biggest offenders seemed to be elemental and magicka resistance, along with reflect and spell absorption. This may be only my opinion, but just about any permanent, non-racial resistance with absolutely no downside is bad. Turning yourself into a walking black hole is worse. Most of the game's constant effect enchantments have been severely toned down, and a handful have even been downgraded to "cast on use" status. The Boots of Blinding Speed, in particular, have had both of these things done to them, since 200 points of  speed is way too much even without cheesing a temporary 100-point magicka resistance to remove the downside of it being permanent.

Since more than a few people will likely object to my treatment of both the Boots of Blinding Speed and the fortify speed effect in general throughout my mod, I suppose I should probably elaborate further. Most players tend to see speed as an a ttribute that serves no other purpose but to shorten the travel times in this game from one point to the next. What they don't see it as is something which helps them to retreat from fights in which they ar e getting their asses handed to them (like the French), or just flatout don't feel like dealing with (like the Swi ss). 200 points of speed may seem perfectly fine to the  jackass who plays a game about exploring and then doesn't want to explore, but it's also a really cheap way to rush past a whole bunch of fights that you should probably be, you know, fighting.

Not everything in this plugin "nerf this" and "nerf that", however. As I mentioned above, much effort went into making the festering cesspool of shitty enchanted item s in the game anywhere from 50 to 75 percent less shitty. Lightning shield 3 points for 5 seconds? Don't make m e laugh. Drain fatigue 1-10 points for 1 second? What in the hell is wrong with you? Feather 20 points for 10 seconds? Are you fucking high? Piss off, you basement-dwelling codpiece. I even added a willpower boost to the bound helmet and raised its armor rating to match the rest of the bound equipment. Though, all of this making shitty equipment less shitty eventually resulted in me having to go back and actually raise the values of a whole shitload of shit that was all rendered cheaper than a two-dollar crack whore as a result.

A few other non-value or enchantment related edits have been made, as well. For starters, quite a few defensively-overpowered artifacts have had their armor ratings lowered to be more appropriate to the weight class that they represent. Simil arly, the damage output of Daedric weapons has been brought down a notch, though they remain the most powerful i n the game. The Sword of White Woe a t Balmora has been removed, but the one that's harder to find/steal has been left alone. Also, the broken glass daggers that you can buy have all bee n repaired to full health so that you have to pay full price for them. Some non-glass armor health and a few weight adjustments were made (Stendarr's Hammer is now actually usable), and I've renamed all of the generically-named unique equipment in the game to avoid confusion.

I've also gone and added something to the game : The Wings of the Queen of Bats (renamed to just "Wings of the Bat Queen"). It's a totally bitchin' two-handed battleaxe that looks like something Gene Simmons would use that's present in the editor, but for some reason just never made it into the game. So, I've hidden it somewhere for you to find. Enjoy.

The last major change I've made takes us full-circle all the way back to the original subject of loads and loads of overvalued equipment and the merchants who love them, because I'm talking about Creeper and the talking mudcrab. I've unchecked their "barter" AI settings, thus forcing you to actually deal with

the game's other merchants to unload all of your crap. And if you're using an economy-adjusting mod that makes dealing with them much more difficult (the "Merchant" portion of HotFusion's Economy Adjuster, natch), expect to actually have to put some effort into your bartering skills now.

I suppose I could have included that last edit in the "Settings" plugin instead, but somehow it felt more appropriate in this one. In fact, it's probably more appropriate here than you might think :)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"SETTINGS" PLUGIN:

The edits I've made to the game settings run the gamut from minor tweaks to things that will likely cause many players to question my sanity. The focus was largely on balancing game elements that I had no way of balancing elsewhere, and the results can seem a bit iron-fisted to anyone who doesn't agree with my thinking. Even though the changelog describes what each GMST that I've edited actually does, most of them demand an explanation as to why they've been edited at all. So, let's ge t to it.

The range at which you can activate objects has been lowered from 9 feet-ish to a little under 8 feet. While I still feel that this is unrealistically long, it's the l owest that I can set it without causing problems (not being able to pick up objects on the ground below you, etc.). Combined with the much more limited effects of Telekinesis (set by the other plugins), this serves to make it harder to steal in plain sight of  NPCs simply by remaining out of range and "reaching" towards whatever you want.

The AI flee settings have been adjusted so that creatures and NPC s will now retreat from combat if their health gets too low. Each creature and NPC has a set "flee" stat that's meant to influence how much damage they have to take before running away, but the default settings were such that only those with a flee value of 60 or higher (none of them, just about) would ever do so. These are not the same settings from Wakim's mod, as his higher values tended to draw complaints about always having to chase after creatures. Mine are a bit more conservative, so most opponents should only head for the hills when they're seriously beaten up, and a good deal of them are still suicidally persistent.

As something of a side-effect of the new fle e settings, demoralize spells and effects should now be much more effective than before. Similarly, the rally effect should also prove more useful, especially if you're

one of those people I mentioned above who hates always having to chase shit down. I've taken the liberty in the "Spells" plugin of adding the Rally Beast spell to the list of those avilable from Ar rille at Seyda Neen as a pre-emptive response to any complaints about these changes. As for the calm and frenzy effects, both deal with a different setting altogether and thus should not be affected.

The magnitude and duration of all self-made potions has been lowered, with the l atter taking the bigger hit of the two. This was because, unlike spell s and enchantments, the game's potion mechanics suffer from the horribly unbalancing ability to "stack" them for greater e ffect. Unfortunately, the only real way to balance this completely would be to remove the stacking mechanic altogether, which just isn't going to happen. So, I settled for the nex t best thing, which was to lower the overall effective ness of potions in general - particularly their durations - so that stacking becomes hopefully more of a chore than it's worth. The real challenge was finding settings that didn't nerf potions to the point to where stacking them was the only way for them to be of any use at all, which I hope I suucceeded in doing.

The value of homemade potions has also been set to ze ro to prevent turning massive and easy profits from making them. This is yet another change taken directly from HotFusion's Economy Adjuster, though my mod is meant to completely re place the module of Economy Adjuster (the "Misc" plugin) in which the edit to this setting appears. Even though it made sense to me for the same reason that enchanted items never went up in value, a lot of players seem to bitch about this one for s ome reason. These are most likely the same people who buy shitloads of cheap ingredients from restocking merchants, mass produce potions at the low cost of 2 gold a pop, and now wonder where all of their free money went. This, in turn, begs the question of why such a player would even be using a mod like mine in the first place.

Armorer was a tough skill to tackle, simply because of how many factors go into it. Its experience gain used to be 0.4 for each successful repair, which was painfully slow. I've raised that value to 0.6 and then halved the value of the GMST which specifies the amount of health restored on each repair, so the skill should now level about three times faster on average (faster on lower levels and slower on higher levels, where the health gain penalty will be respectively more and less pronounced). This should be extremely helpful on lower levels, where the Armorer skill is a royal bitch to increase.

To compensate for their reduced effectiveness, repair hammers and tongs gain more uses. This has the added benefit of making them more worth carrying around, particularly at higher levels of Armorer where repair attempts almost always succeed. It also serves to make raising your skill up from lower levels (where repair attempts almost never succeed) a bit easier, as well as encourages players with lower skill levels to use lower-quality equipment, as the cheaper hammers were given more uses. To

balance this change out, repair equipment values have been raised greatly, and the cost of the repair service has been cut in half. This, in turn, helps make the latter a more financially attractive option in many cases (where previously it wasn't), as repair items are now a much more significant expense than before.

The increased disposition penalty for having your weapon drawn was yet another idea taken from Wakim, though mine is a bit less severe (his 15-point penalty had NPCs treating me like a leper whenever I forgot to sheathe my axe before stepping into town). The increased bonus for other members of your own race was my idea, and I think that it's now significant enough to add an interesting dynamic to your choice of race at the outset of the game. Playing as one of the more common races (Imperial or Dark Elf, namely) now carries the added benefit of getting along much better with most of the game's NPCs.

The enchant system as a whole gets w hat is easily the most drastic of all the overhauls made by my mod. It's no secret that even the developers thought that the skill was unbalanced beyond repair, hence its removal in Oblivion. The "Spells" plugin already launched the first volley against this overpowered beast by denying it many commonly-abused spell effects. My continued efforts in this module remove the ability of enchanted items to regain their spent charges over time, thus forcing you use soul gems for this purpose, as well as disallowing players from creating self-enchanted items - or constant effect enchantments at all. I did make up for this with a fe w concessions, however, which I'll explain below.

Removing the player's ability to create their own e nchantments is probably the one move that'll make players squawk the most, so I suppose I'll start explaining there. Let me just say this: you should not be able to create enchantments by yourself. Period. You can't make your own spells, so why in the name of  Odin would it make sense for you to be able to make something infinitely more useful? There's a very good reason that, even with maxed-out stats, you're still very bad at enchanting shit without resorting to blatantly exploiting flaws in the game, which is likely the exact same reason that paying to have it done for you costs an arm and over nine thousand leg s. These are obviously the half-assed attempts of  the developers to balance a system that even they knew is so broken that even spammers think it's cheap.

But since I've done what I consider to be "fixing" the enchant system, there's no longer any need to, shall we say, "compensate". Executed properly, the payment requirement for enchantments should only be such that it remains balanced versus the magicka and alchemy skills - as opposed to balanced against itself. I've lowered the cost of en chanting services to one quarter of their original value, or about fifty

times the cost of spellmaking, which should hopefully shut most of you up. And for those of you that it doesn't... well, there's always chloroform.

The removal of homemade enchantments actually ended up killing two birds with one stone. The Morrowind Code Patch raised some balance issues (and a few eyebrows) a few releases back when it started allowing players to enchant projectile weapons. As it turned out, this was a rather gamebreaking feature due to how much more powerful it rendered your long-range combat abilities. Requiring players to pay for all enchantments, on the other hand, turned out to be just the equalizer I was looking for. I didn't even need to adjust the enchantment capacities for projectiles as the MC P suggests, as the highest values are all conveniently restricted to the highest-quality/rarest ones (this is why daedric, ebony, and glass projectiles have all been made suddenly more expensive again in the "Equipment" plugin, by the way), and none of them are real ly high enough to warrant any concern.

Additionally, the Morrowind Code Patch has now granted us the ability to adjust the cost of paying for "cast once" enchantments independently from that of permanent ones, which makes more than just a tiny bit of sense. This is implemented by activating a previously-unused GMST in the game's code, (there's quite a few of them, apparently). I 've responded to this by editing fMagicItemOnceMult (the GMST in question) to raise the cost of "cast once" e nchantments to 1/100 of their original value, as well as vastly increased the enchanting capacities of paper. C ombined, these changes should allow scrolls to grant players access to far more powerful spells than he or she would otherwise be capable of utilizing.

As for the fact that magic items no longer recharge on their own, my reasons are twofold. The first reason, in the same vein as several of my other changes, is to remove any possible strategic benefit from the "wait" button. Secondly, and somewhat related to the first r eason, is that I felt the need to reinforce the ability to recharge magic items as the primary use of soul gems. Note that neither reason involves stopping players from attaining a nigh-limitless supply of charges, since stockpiling filled soul gems will still have more or less the same practical effect as spamming the "wait" button does. But gi ven that you actually have to work to acquire filled soul gems, I have no problem allowing it.

A lot of players will probably see the natural magic item recharge edit as yet another harsh nerfing mostly due to the relative scarcity of soul gems with which to recharge them manually. In response to this, and because I also felt that soul g ems were a pain in the ass to find, I've added a restocking supply of them to various merchants throughout the game. These are the same merchants to which I've added several new spells in the "Spells" plugin, mainly because I didn't feel like editing a whole new set of  them, but also because their distribution across the map seemed rather appropriate. Most of them are located in either the Ascadian Isles region (Ebonheart and Vivec, namely) or along Azura's Coast. And

none of them are any farther north than Fort Buckmoth/Ghostgate, at least until you go as far east as Vos, so be sure to stock up before heading out to West Gash.

I also realize that not all players may be proficient in mysticism or know the Soul Trap spell, thus necessitating an alternate method of recharging magic items barring their natural regeneration. To this end, I've also added a restocking supply of various filled soul gems to the above-mentioned merchants in addition to the empty ones. Note that because of the way I've scripted them to work, I was able to set my own values rather than rely on the game's notoriously iffy pricing formula for filled soul gems. This is good, since the entire intent of these additions hinges on their ability to remain affordable, which even the shittiest gems with the shittiest souls are definitely not under normal circumstances.

While definitely related to the subject at hand, the value of soul gems is also something of a separate matter, as well. I had previously tanked their values in this plug-in because their recalculated values when filled with souls completely fucked the game's economy. Once again, the Morrowind Code Patch came to the rescue by making the value of filled soul gems no longer depend on the value of the gem itself, leaving me to set their val ues to represent their actual worth ra ther than how broken Morrowind's economy is. It also allowed me more freedom to re-adjust their holding capacities for better balance and to make the higher quality gems more expensive while allowing the lower-e nd ones to remain cheap.

The problem that we run into here is tha t, unless you happen to be using the soul gem value rebalance fix from the Morrowind Code Patch, this plugin will just break the game's economy even further. Adding an infinte supply of filled soul gems to merchant inventories proved to be a much more difficult task than I had assumed, and the short explanation is that it was necessary for me to create new items that  just look like filled soul gems but really aren't, which were then scripted to be immediately replaced with a real filled soul gem when purchased. The values of these new items are static; the value of a filled soul gem is not. My soul gem stand-ins use the modified values set forth by the Morrowind Code Patch, since they're far more reasonable for the purpose I'm trying to serve. Without the fix, however, you'll end up with a filled soul gem worth far more than you paid for it. Then again, operating under the previouslystated assertion that the game's economy is totally fucked without it, all I'm really doing to an unpatched game at this point is pissing into an ocean made entirely out of piss.

Also note that, for compatibility reasons, this plug-in also contains the same edits to the new soul gem merchants that the "Spells" plug-in made to them (i.e . the new spells it gives them). Using both the "Spells" and "Settings" plug-in together will have the latter override the former by default, and will thus

result in both sets of changes being made. Just don't fuck with the default load order of my plugins (lik e I  just know that some retard will go and do, anyway) and everything should be all gravy.

Lastly, there remained the issue of constant effect enchantments. No amount of making them harder to acquire could really erase the fact that most constant effect enchantments players ever come up with are incredibly cheap and often blatantly exploited inherent flaws in the game. After I quelled such douchebaggery in my "Spells" plugin by removing enchanting privileges from the worst offenders, it was pointed out to me that constant effect en chantments became, as a result, not really good for anything. And, quite frankly, I agreed. So i nstead, I've simply removed the ability to create constant effect enchantments altogether, which thus allowed me to re instate the enchanting option for several effects from which it was removed solely due to rampant constant effect abuse.

It should be noted that, despite everything I've done to the enchanting system in this mod, there's a lot more that I couldn't do due to the l imitations of the Construction Set and the fac t that the worst of the system's problems are hard-coded into the game. What few conessions I've actually made in the midst of my no-holds-barred beatdown of the game's horribly broken enchanting system I never would have if  not for the fact that the Morrowind Code Patch has at long last done what was previously thought impossible and tackled the final remaining issues with the game's enchanting system: its practically nonexistent casting time and wildly exponential skill growth rate.

Again, I should probably explain. Remember that enchanted items have both a zero-percent failure rate and an instant casting time, meaning that the only l imitation to how fast you can dish out the pain from your enchanted codpiece of hellfire is how fast you can spam the "use" key. Many players don't really seem to appreciate the monumental significance of these features except by universally crediting them for the fact that the enchant skill essentially replaces spellcasting about an hour into the game. A n enchanted item of even moderate power can deal several times more damage per second than even the most powerful spells or weapons, thus making just about any other form of combat somewhat pointless.

Thus, the Morrowind Code Patch now institutes a "cooldown" time of four seconds after using enchanted items, which is slightly longer than that of a spel l to balance the still-inherent benefits of  magic items (i.e., the lack of a casting tim e and the guaranteed success rate). This change alone stops most enchant-related faggotry dead in its tracks, and makes the enchant system function as I truly believe the developers initially intended it to. Rather than replacing your spellcasting abilities outright, it ends up serving more as a "reserve" magicka pool due to the virtually limitless availability of charges

(see my point about stockpiling filled soul gems above), as well as filling in the gaps of your magical abilities by providing effects from schools in which you aren't particularly well-versed.

The other problem is the fact that, due to the exponential growth of the enchant skil l, the benefits it conveyed past a level of about 70 or so were insane. Getting just a few uses out of an enchanted item without having to recharge it is already a nice bonus in and of itself, but getting a few hundred uses after breaking the second half of the chessboard (wiki it) is fucking ridiculous. Granted, this isn't as much of a big deal since the "cooldown" thing above makes this less of a game balance issue and more just a point of principle/convenience. Either way, the MCP now fixes the growth rate to be more linear.

The enchant skill progression rates themselves we re also edited to reflect the whole mess of changes mentioned above. No more is the enchant skill the over powered game-breaker it once was, conferring god-like power upon its user at higher levels, so no longer is it necessary to make raising it such a pain in the ass. Experience can now be gaine d by using "cast on strikes" weapons, and the experience g ain per magic item use has been increased tenfold, which is intended not only to make up for the extra effort that now must go into recharging magic items, but also to make routine use the most efficient method of gaining experience (to wit, I've lowered the experience gain for straight-up recharge spam). I felt no need to edit the gain for magic item creation because - go figure - you're not allowed to do it anymore. It's probably also worth mentioning that, in addition to soul gems, Arrille now also sells the Soul Trap spell, so it should now be a whole lot easier to raise your skill level right off the bat.

Fatigue loss from running was lowered, as I felt that the previous setting tended to discourage running places until you cheesed a constant effect restore fa tigue enchantment. On the other hand, I've raised the fatigue loss from fighting and especially jumping, which in turn should hopefully (but probably still won't) stop the insipid act of "bunny-hopping" everywhere you go. Also, I didn't adjust the settings for swimming, so expect the change in fatig ue loss from running on dry land to swimming "fast" to be much more noticeable (three times as much, to be exact).

Camping has been completely disabled in this plugin. Every cell where camping was legal has been edited (shouldn't cause any problems with other mods - see the "conflicts & compatibility" section for more details) to make camping there illegal, and the "camping here is illegal..." message has been changed to simply ask how long you'd like to wait. This makes it necessary to find a bed if you want to rest. Just about every settlement in the g ame has at least one bed that you can easily access, so all that's really changed is that you now a have good reason to do so. Well, I've also made it so that you can't just completely restore your health and magicka whenever you fucking please (the "threat" of a random encounter interrupting your rest be damned), which is how it already works in most other RPGs,

anyway. And while I'm aware that many an RPG before Morrowind has instituted some form of a camping system, that doesn't really change the fact that it's a horrible concept that's almost never handled well.

Now, granted, Breath of Fire III is easily one of the best games ever made (warning: lengthy diatribe forthcoming), and it also featured a camping system. But unlike Morrowind, its setup wasn't unbalancing within the context of the game for two reasons. First, a character's maximum HP would decrease every time that he or she died in battle, and camping would not fix this. Re sting at an inn, however, would. This allowed paying to rest at an inn to provide a benefit beyond that of just camping, which was free. Secondly, although you could camp anywhere on the overworld map, Breath of Fire III was unusual amongst typical JRPGs in that there were no (unavoidable) random encounters on the world map. The game did not allow you to make camp anywhere in which an actual threat was posed to your party, which in the world of Morrowind is pretty much anywhere outside of town (and, in some cases, inside town). So quit your bitching, pick up your sword, and step out into the wilderness. Embrace it. Love it. Fear it.

Note that the camping/cell edits made by this plugin are a bit iffy in that they have a tendency to often not work as advertised. This has absolutely nothing to do with my mod, and is an issue with the game engine itself. Trying to rest in any cell that was previously legal to camp in that you've already e ntered prior to installing this plugin will still allow you to do so, and what's really annoying is that this will also carry over into a new game unless you completely exit/restart the program itself. Just make sure to use Wyre Mash to clean any saved game that you apply any of my plugins to and you shouldn't have any problems. As for the fact that Morrowind tends to reuse old data (which is really bad, by the way), I imagine that the Morrowind Code Patch will eventually get around to fixing that.

Sneaking has been made more difficult when you're in plain sight of an NPC, the intent being to force you to put more effort into both using the sneak skill as well as raising it if you intend to do much of the former, especially given the major nerfing done to the chameleon and telekinesis effects in the other plugins. However, it also levels up faster now to make up for that. More importantly, these edits tend to encourage leveling the sneak skill more through routine use than through slapping a rubber band on the controller and stepping out for a wank. The experience gain from picking pockets has been raised significantly, as well, for very much the same reasons. And while I've somewhat lowered the insane damage dealt by sneak attacks, they're still more than powerful enough to be worth trying to inflict.

It's been noted that the most likely weapon to be used in a sneak atta ck - a short blade - doesn't do a whole lot of damage in most cases, and thus appropriately benefitted from the initial insane multiplier

for sneak attack damage. And while I agree with that sentiment, it really doesn't change the fact that the only thing more painful than a sneak attack from a Daedric battleaxe under the game's original rules was my marriage. If anybody is aware of a possible method to script sneak attack damage to vary depending on the type of weapon used, shoot me a line and perhaps we can work something out. But until then, this setting isn't going to change (so please stop asking).

Pretty much everything I said about sneaking also applies to the security skill, as well. Security in general has been made more difficult to use, thus requiring you to put more effort into raising your skil l if you want to be any good at it. But, it also levels much quicker than before, mainly through what I consider to be "routine" use. Disarming traps now offers a very nice experience gain that's hopefully large enough to discourage spamming the shit out of a lock spell, though the "Spells" plugin also helps by banning custom lock spells and raising the costs and/or magnitudes of the pre-made one(s).

Skill progression itself has also been slowed down some, with reg ards to major, minor, and misc skills. Major skills have been slowed to the previous growth speed of minor skills, and minor skills to the previous speed of misc skills. Misc skills, on the other hand, have been slowed completely to a stop, thus forcing you to rely on skill books and paid training to raise them. The first two changes are mostly to slow level-ups down a bit by keeping your major and minor skills from rocketing totally out of control, but that last change is the big one. And by "big one", I mean it's probably controversial enough to ge t me tarred and feathered by angry (and surprisingly violent) Morrowind fanatics.

I can argue at great length about why a natural misc skill growth embargo is an excellent idea for both balance and gameplay, but I'll do my best to avoid writing a novel here and summarize the major points. First, and most importantly, it addresses the fact that the game levels along with your character (and thus with your major and minor skills), whereas your misc skills can be raised to the same ultimate maximum value without the conseqeunce of the game becoming more difficult as a result. It's a common behavior of less scrupulous players to choose skills they have no intentions of ever using as majors and minors so that this fatal flaw in the game's design can be exploited to great effect.

Secondly, and somewhat related to the first point, is that it forces you to play the game the way that it's actually meant to be played. The single most common complaint that I'm sure I 'll hear about this change is that players want to gain exper ience from their actions, which is the exact r eason that your selection of major and minor skills is supposed to be a reflection of how you intend to play the game. But players instead do the exact opposite of what the g ame intends by tailoring their playing styles towards manipulating the system. They select major and minor skills based solely on how easy they are to raise and misc skills based on what attributes they want to have maxed out by level 5. At no point is the

question, "will I ever fucking use this?" ever asked, because the player at that point is far more concerned with how in the hell he's going to micro-manage attribute multipliers from 27 different skills, only 10 of which control the level-up that all 27 of them are contributing to.

Removing the natural experience gain for m isc skills allows you to assume much greater control over how your character develops, as you no longer have to worry about "wasting" attribute multipliers from misc skill gains and are free to play as you wish. This holds especially true for the first level, which was previously pratically guaranteed a 5x multiplier for both personality and speed due to the rapid early growth of athletics and mercantile (both very likely to be set as misc skills for characters from races not particularly known for their speed or charm), thus leadi ng to a great deal of obsessive behavior regarding not using any skill that might waste any pre cious attribute multipliers. And if that sounds like fun to you, then I hope you're reading this from inside a room with lots of padding on the walls.

This brings us to my third and final major point, which is that this change adds a much greater se nse of  legitimacy to several aspects of the game in which is was previously lacking. I don't imagine, for example, that anybody has ever deliberately selected athletics as a major skill for any reason other than cheap level-ups. But now, it makes a good choice as such because maxing it out as a misc skill is no longer the given it once was. One, training costs money - lots of it. Two, the additional layer of difficulty due to the attribute requirements for training could be the basis of another discussion in its own right. Three, and be honest, when's the last tim e you actually paid for athletics training?

An argument could be made that I'm merely replacing skill grinding with cash grinding, which is sort of a valid point. Personally, I see the decision of which misc skills to invest my hard-earned cash on raising as an extension - if not an evolution - of a system where you have some degree of control of how your character grows. Whether a character grinds for cash to pay for misc skill s or pays for misc skills because he has some cash that he wants to spend is a bit of a c hicken-or-the-egg argument, and perhaps irrelevant. But consider "grinding" for cash to pay for trai ning when my mod (along with HotFusion's) removes every "cheap" way of earning money versus the "grinding" one would otherwise engage in to raise those misc skills the natural way. Which really feels like more of a grind to you?

The commonly-held view among the Morrowind community is that merely slowing the growth of  miscellaneous skills will still have all of the positive effects discussed above while still allowing players to get that warm, fuzzy feeling of accomplishment, no matter how meaningless, whenever they use skills that they should never be competent with in the first place. Some make the mistake of applying realworld logic to the problem by claiming that it only makes sense that characters should get better at their skills with practice. By that logic, people should be capable of mastering any skill - even ones for w hich

they lack any sort of natural talent - through repetition alone and without the outside help of such bullshit as education or training. But if anything, most of us still suck at what w e do even with those things, and I've yet to see a single result from all my years of practicing having a vagina.

But what really grinds my gears more than anything isn't the faulty logic involved - at least not the aforementioned faulty logic - it's the illusion that slowing down skill growth makes raising the skills in question more challenging. And just so we're clear, this next sentence is getting its own paragraph:

Time-consuming =/= harder

Period. Exclamation mark, even. This one factoid alone is essentially the entire thesis of my changes here, if not that of my entire mod. To assume that most players don't want to waste days of their lives for miniscule skill gains is to assume that most players actually have lives. My mod is aimed - very specifically - at those of us who clearly don't. Simply put, the one fact that everybody can ag ree on is that miscellaneous skills must have some drawback to balance them agai nst major and minor skills other than the fact that they're a bigger waste of time than majors and minors are, otherwise Morrowind just boils down to nothing more than a big waste of tim e. And I'm sure that's not what any of us wan t.

But even with this detailed argument that will only continue to get stronger as I'm further challenged to explore and defend the merits of my ideas, I'm aware that most people will still disagree with me and will hate my rotten guts if I force them to play my personal vision of how Morrowind was actually meant to me. So, I've begrudgingly included an alternate "Settings" plugin in the "extra stuff" folder that omits my changes to major, minor, and miscellaneous skill growth. I hope you choke on it.

The skill multiplier settings have been adjusted to make it a bit easier to earn 3x and 4x attribute gains on level up. With the previous settings, you were stuck with a 2x gain unless you put a serious amount of  effort (5 levels) into raising related skills, whereas the requirements for a 4x gain were so close to achieving 5x that there was often no point in not just pushing on for it. The new settings now reflect a linear progression rate: 1 level for a 2x stat gain, 4 levels for a 3x gain, 7 levels for 4x, and 10 levels for 5x. The fact that these benchmarks are identical to the ones in the 3D Might & Magic games is purely a coincidence, and has nothing to do with my undying love of the M&M series. Really.

To help reinforce the need for water breathing spells/potions/enchantments, the amount of time that you can hold your breath has been shortened and the amount of damage taken per second from

suffocation has been tripled. The odds of contracting disease have been doubled, which helps reinforce theusefulness of disease-resisting spells/potions/enchatments. Also, the chances for retrieving projectiles from dead opponents have been doubled, which should allow you to carry less of the damn things around.

Elemental shields (fire/frost/lightning shield) now deal a significant amount of damage, which helps to make them actually more useful than a resist effect. Unarmored is also now more effective, topping out at a naked AC of 100 instead of 65. However, due to th e exponential nature of the skill, this will only be noticed at higher levels (to wit, an Unarmored skill of 50 will still only provide a naked AC of 25).

The speed of magical projectiles has been quadrupled, which should help to make magical combat more entertaining, or at least more ineteresting. NPCs also now have 50% more magicka than before, with any luck to the same effect. My commentary of the "Spells" plugin contains a much more detailed description of the subject in general, particularly on how the latter change will affect the game overall.

The cost of training has been doubled, which actually isn't very much gi ven its status as the game's biggest money sink (for comparison: Economy Adjuster quintupled the cost). However, given my misc skill growth embargo, training moves up from a mere expense of convenience to a very improtant and intregal part of gameplay, thus necessitating that I keep the cost relatively affordable. Note that my decision was largely influenced by my use of the "Merchant" module of HotFusion's Economy Adjuster, since the cutthroat social skills it gives trainers makes the 5x rate hike fucking brutal. Anyone who doesn't use a trade-balancing mod that does at least s omething to address the low mercantile and speechcraft skills of NPCs may find my setting to still be a bit too low. Then again, if you're not the kind of person who would use such a mod in the first place, you probably won't.

The only other barter-related edit in this module decreases the merchant gold reset delay, which is basically the amount of time it takes for a merchan t to revert to the default amount of gold available for barter, from one day to one hour. This is because the only real limitation presented by the amount of  gold a merchant has on hand is, in most cases, the maximum value of a single transaction. So, pretty much any reset time beyond "none" is time that will likely be spent standing in front of a merchant and slapping the "wait" button like a noisy child, which is behavior I try to discourage whenever possible.

Another edit I've made causes NPC s to stop "greeting" you from a distance, which in my case usually tends to involve having insults tossed at me whenever I pass within 10 feet of them. The new se tting

should make them only audibly greet you if you're standing directly in front of them for at least a second or so. In the case of many NPC greetings (at least the ones I get), this is far more appropriate.

The skill progression rate changes, or at least the ones that have changed the most, have all already been discussed in detail above. This includes alchemy, which was mentioned earlier in the description of  its own plugin. The approach that I've taken with the skill progression rates in general has evolved a lot throughout the history of this mod (as a quick glance ove r the version history file will no doubt reveal), but the ultimate goal remains the same: to discourage the spamming/grinding of skills as much as possible while promoting their growth through regular use.

The crossroads that the above statement brings us to i s the not-so-fine line that separates the skills which see plenty of routine use from the ones that generally don't. Those that fall into the latter category are the ones most prone to being spammed, often because spamming them is the only re alistic means of raising them. These skills - Sneak and Security, for example - are the ones whose growth I've hastened with the aim of reducing their "grind time". This functions solely as an AFF (Anti-Frustration Feature) and doesn't make the game any easier since raising these skills for the most part doesn't make you any more effective in combat. Rather, they'll cause you to level up (see my discussion about misc skill growth above) and thus make combat more difficult as the game levels up with you.

On the other hand, the skills w hich do get used frequently are frequently used because they are the ones that make you more effective in combat. These are the skills whose growth needed to be slowed down for a number of reasons, the primary one being that they in many cases tend t o grow a whole lot faster than you want them to. All weapons and armor now level more slowly than before, with the sole exception being Marksman, which now levels faster. Athletics has been set to level up slower on land, but faster while swimming, hopefully making its cancer-like growth rate a bit easier to manage.

Acrobatics has had its governing attribute switched to ag ility in order to prevent using it to cheese 5x strength multipliers. The way I see it, if any stat should be easy to raise in this g ame, it oughta be the one that helps your attacks to actually fucking connect once in aw hile. Hand to Hand is changed to a strength-based skill to make up for it, however, which makes a hell of a lot more sense to me than speed did. Besides, speed already has the other easiest skill in the game to raise on its side, so it's not like it needs the extra support or anything.

Lastly, I've also added some new guards to a handful o f places I thought needed them, either because an expensive item was too easy to steal, or a shopkeeper with an expensive item was too easy to murder so

that you could steal his/her expensive item(s). Two of these g uards - the one in the Caldera Mage 's Guild tower and the one at Ralds Oril's shop in Suran - were previously the CalSurGuardMod by Da Nang, which I had packaged along with this mod in the "extra stuff" folder. I have since merged it with this plugin so that I can add on to it as I see fit. So far, I've only added one more guard - to Nalcarya's shop in Balmora. I do envision quite a few possible updates to this portion of the m od, as well.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2. TECHNICAL INFO

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is almost no technical help that I can give, nor should anyone need, with this mod. The plugin files and their changelogs are located inside the "BTB's Game Improvements" folder, and an alternate version of the "Character" plugin is in the "extra s tuff" folder for anyone experiencing visual "wash out" with the permanent Khajiit night-eye ability in the original. Just copy the desired plugin(s) to your Morrowind/Data Files folder, and you should all know the drill past that.

Obviously, you will have to be starting a new game for many of these changes (namely, those from the "Character" plugin) to have any real effect. Aside fr om that, Wyre Mash should take care of any issues with applying any of the plugins to an existing game. Bloodmoon and Tribunal are required only for the "Alchemy" and "Equipment" plugins, but not having them both by now is a s tatistical impossibility.

Oh, and don't fuck with the default load order. The "Spells" and "Settings" plugins both edit the same NPCs, and only the latter (which should load after and over ride the former) contains both sets of edits.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

3. CONFLICTS & COMPATIBILITY

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

GENERAL CONFLICT INFORMATION:

As a general rule, BTB's Game Improvements will only conflict with other mods that are trying to do the same thing that it is. Anyone who uses the "Character" plugin alongside another mod that also edits birthsigns, for example, deserves every conflict that their stupid ass gets.

Though most of the changes are rather obvious, I shoul d point out that both the "Spells" and "Settings" plugins edit a handful of NPCs to give them new spells and soul gems to sell. I tried my best to pick boring ones that nobody else would want to modify, but you never know.

The NPCs modified are as follows:

 Arrille (probably the biggest potential for conflict)  Aldaril  Amarie Charien  Aunius Autrus  Diren Vendu  Elynu Saren  Ervona Barys  Fanildil  Ferise Varo  J'Rasha  Malven Romori  Melie Frenck  Nelso Salenim  Saras Orelu  Solea Nuccusius  Ulmiso Maloren

Also, the "Settings" plugin edits the "DATA" sub-header of every cell in the game in which it's legal to camp in order to make it illegal to camp in those cells, thus removing the ability to camp entirely. Since the legality of camping is one of the only things the "DATA" sub-header is actually used for, the potential for conflicts is very low. Any mod that renames a cell will have the new name replaced with the (master file) default name, but for any sort of a real problem to occur, a mod would need to both rename a cell and have a script or dialogue that references that cell by its new name. And while there probably are mods out there that do this, I'm not aware of any. Furthermore, the conflict would be very easily resolved simply by manually placing the mod in question after mine in the load order.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE MORROWIND PATCH PROJECT:

I've gone to great pains to ensure that I am not undoing any of the fine work done by Quarn and the rest of the Morrowind Patch Project team. Ve rsion 3.0 of my mod introduced full compatability with the latest stable release of the M.P.P. at the time (1.6.4), while version 3.5 introduced new fixes from the 1.6.5 beta release. There should be no conflict issues with version 3.5 (or higher) of my mod and the Morrowind Patch Project, regardless of which version of the M.P.P. is used.

The changelog for each plugin has a section at the bottom specifically devoted to documenting every change I make that overrides or includes a change made by the Morrowind Patch Project. In most cases, I've included the approproate M.P.P. fix along with my own edits. Those fixes will all be mentioned in this section, regardless of whether or not it's already been detailed as part of the main changes made by the plugin. Some M.P.P. fixes are omitted, however, and are listed separately for your convenience.

Download the Morrowind Patch Project (if you haven't already) at:

http://btb2.free.fr/files/morrowind_patch.zip

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DARK BROTHERHOOD ARMOR REPLACER - EXPANDED:

Dark Brotherhood Armor Replacer - Expanded (henceforth refe rred to as "D.B.A.R.E.") will conflict with the "Equipment" module from this mod because both of them edit the same thing. D.B.A.R.E. elects not to edit the stats of the existing Dark Brotherhood equipment at all, and the stats of t he new equipment it adds seem much more in line with the game's default settings (overeffective and overvalued) than with what any sane person might think up. Thus, I crea ted a pair of compatibility plugins that not only resolve the conflict with BTB's Game Improvem ents, but also apply my changes to the new equipment in order to bring it in line with everything else. Refer to the included readme for more details.

As of version 4.0 of this mod, the compatibility plugins for D.B.A.R.E. are now packaged along with BTB's Game Improvements instead of being avilable as a se parate download. You can find them and the aforementioned included readme inside the "extra stuff" folder. Remember that you only need to use one of the two plugins in lieu of the orig inal D.B.A.R.E. plugin and in addition to the "Equipment" plugin, and I recommend using the one that also delays the Dark Brotherhood assasination attemps (the one labeled "DDBA") until such point in the game that they are actually warranted.

Download Dark Brotherhood Armor Replacer - Expanded at:

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=4070

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

BETTER CLOTHES:

Since Better Clothes specifies new meshes for the game's unique clothing, it will conflict with the "Equipment" plugin, which edits the values/enchantments of some of those items. I have thus created a compatibility plugin to address this issue and packaged it along with BTB's Game Improvements (found in the "extra stuff" folder). Use it in li eu of the original "Better Clothes" plugins and in addition to the "Equipment" plugin from BTB's Game Improvements if the two are being used together.

More recently, a modder by the name of Plankgye has continued the Better Cl othes project by editing more clothes that the original plugin (which only upgraded the textures of about half of the game's clothes) missed. This meant updating my compatibility plugin to keep it current, so it thus now requres both the original Better Clothes and the More Better Clothes addon to work properly. Since it combines the changes from the original mod and the addon, only my edited plugins is required in place of both the original plugin and the addon plugin.

Download Better Clothes at:

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=8737

Download Plankgye's More Better Clothes addon at:

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=8931

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CANADIAN ICE'S ROBES:

It's pretty much the same situation here as with Better Clothes: CanadianIce's R obes replace robes that are also edited by the "Equipment" plugin, so I created some compatibility plugins based on the various plugins from both versions of CanadianIce's Robes and packaged them along with BTB's Game Improvements. Check the "extra stuff" folder, replace the plugin you're using with the appropriate compatibility plugin, and consult the included readme (also in the "extra stuff" folder) if you have any questions.

Download CanadianIce's Robes at:

http://canadianice.moddersrealm.com/RobeReplacer.html?action=downloads;sa=view;down=4 8

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

GALSIAH'S CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT:

The way that Galsiah's mod works means that it shouldn't conflict with BTB's Game Improvements, at least not in a conventional sense. I have had several reports of general wonkiness with GCD and the

"Character" plugin that appear to be due to the Level-Up Birthsign Remover script. Results are still inconclusive as to why this is, because according to Galsiah him(her?)self, there shouldn't be any problems between the two. If you encounter any such wonkiness, I would like to hear about it. I will also be glad to help you with disabling the Level-Up Birthsign Remover script (which GCD renders pointless, anyways), which should fix the problem.

Another thing to note about combining Galsiah's Character Development with BTB's Game Improvements is that, as of version 5.0 of my mod, they both try to do the same thing, albeit in much different ways. Thus, combining the "Settings" plugin with GCD will make for an extra-harsh game. Ditto for other such leveling mods as MADD Leveler and its respective ilk.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

MORROWIND COMES ALIVE:

I really don't know a whole lot about this one, as my knowledge of MCA is quite limited. I know of no real problems between this mod and mine, and the one report I have heard is technically an issue with MCA itself instead of an actual conflict. It would appear that MCA adds merchants to the game who bear the "auto-calculate" NPC flag, which is something of a big no-no when it comes to spell merchants in particular. This is because these new spell merchants may potentially sell any spell in the game that's also set to auto-calculated - the vast majority of which were never meant to be available to the player.

The above issue is considerably less noticeable if you're using the Morrowind Patch Project (which you had damn well better be), since it rem oves the auto-calculate flag from m ost of the spells that clearly shouldn't have it. However, there are still plenty of auto-calculated spells in the game that were only really meant for use by auto-calculated NPCs. Again, you'd probably never notice this unless you also happened to be using the "Spells" plugin from BTB's Game Improvements, which removes autocalculation from nearly all of the game's pre-made spells and then adds a few dozen new ones meant solely for the use of auto-calculated NPCs. Needless to say, the new ones are rather easy to spot in a lineup.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NAKED NPCS (VARIOUS MODS):

Because the "Settings" plugin increases the effectiveness of the Unarmored skill, the possibility is introduced that certain NPCs may weigh their armor skills versus their unarmored skills and reach the (admittedlty correct) conclusion that they would be better off stripping naked before charging into battle. And they do. However, I have at this point no confirmed reports of this happening to any NPCs that are not added or in some way otherwise altered by other mods.

Telvanni guards were the NPCs that I originally recieved reports about, and are the only NPCs that are originally in the game (that I'm aware of, at any rate) to whom this can happen. Their skills would appear to suggest that it definitely will, but I have not seen it happen in my gam e. Thus, I can only conclude that this phenomenon is the result of the changes made by my mod when further influenced by the additional changes of another, currently unknown mod. Furthermore, my attempt to address the issue by altering the skills of Telvanni guards resulted in the game crashing whenever I went anywhere near them, and I thus intend to take no further action until such time that more information is provided.

It should also be noted that, should you encounter this problem, there is at this time no known way to get the affected NPC to put his/her clothes back on even if the offending mod(s) is/are removed (short of starting a new game). The only solution is simply to learn to ac cept the funny naked people.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

4. CREDITS & CLOSING

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 This mod was created (almost) entirely by me , BTB ( [email protected] ).

 A very large portion of the credit for this mod goes to Wakim and HotFusion for inspiring it.

 The Level-Up Birthsign Remover script was written by SpectaclesOfDoom, which was subsequently modified by myself to accomodate the needs of this mod.

 The portion of the "Settings" plugin which adds more guards to the game is based upon a mod created for me by Da Nang (CalSurGuardMod) that has since been merged with and built upon by my own mod.

 The portion of the "Settings" plugin which disables camping was coded by the incredibly awesome John Moonsugar, who was also a great help to me regarding my questions in other areas.

 The "Alchemy" plugin has been merged with the "Heartwood" mod by Midgetalien.

 Hrnchamd, author of the Morrowind Code Patch, has indirectly contributed quite a bit to the crea tion of this mod by working with me to address various problems that I had no way of fixing myself, most notably regarding the game's incredibly broken enchanting system.

 A GameFAQs poster named Can Of Beans has requested to be mentioned here for no reason whatsoever.

A very special thanks also goes out to all of the wonderful folks over at the Morrowind mod board on the official Elder Scrolls forums, if nothing else than for tolerating my presence there. They have been quite helpful in helping me address any issues I've come across in the rather lengthy process of putting this whole mess together, as well as providing me with much-needed moral support. So, thanks.