Another Hearthfires Mod, with added Dremora Options

[ghastley]

I put together a Nordic Tower home for my latest Dremora character, and have started making it into another Hearthfires mod, so you can find the tower empty (except for a workbench and anvil) and start making it more comfortable by adding furniture etc. The location is between Valthume and Lost Valley, near the Cradle Stone Tower, but closer to the edge of the map. So close, that you can't fall off the back side as "you can't go that way".

I've managed to squeeze in all the crafting stations, and a double bed. There's no room for kids, which avoids having to support adoption. It has an observation platform on top, copied from one at Valtheim.

I'm thinking of providing a spell book that teaches "Summon Dremora Housecarl" which combines the long duration of the elemental thralls with a bit of the Dremora Merchant and Butler powers from Dragonborn. To make it useful, I'd select one of several "builds" according to the player's skills, so a mage gets a tank, and a melee character gets a mage or archer, etc. However, the gender of the summoned Dremora may need player selection, somehow. Maybe two spell books, and reading one destroys the other?

The reason for summoning, rather than just using a Dremora NPC, is that the Dremora can be levelled when summoned, so re-summoning when the player levels will keep them in step without re-equipping. Since a Dremora can't wear most armour, this would offset the inability to swap out their gear, and also provide the in-game reason for not doing so.

[ghastley]

Update and keep going. All I added were the new hairstyles, and those happen as soon as you re-summon or reload.

I re-saved all the FaceGen data, I hope. because there's a lot of use of one actor as a template for another, only the base face gets used, so I may even have too many included. The big bump in the size of the archive is the meshes and textures for the new hair, which is way higher poly than it needs to be. Since the whole mechanism for summoning restricts how many characters are wearing it, I don't think it's a performance issue.

If anyone complains, I'll tell them to drop off the 4k re-textures of the chickens to compensate.

I'll probably spend a lot of time this weekend tying to make screen-shots for the Nexus. A high proportion of my test characters are Dremora, to make it easier to test the hair etc. and most armor, and all clothes, don't show on them. So I have to do a race swap in RaceMenu to get a screenie I can use from the various saves.

And my latest couple of games have Illia or Aranea running around in just a circlet and boots. I've been testing out follower + housecarl to see what problems that causes. It turns out to be better than two followers, because any fight in the ranks that results from friendly fire can quickly be ended with a re-cast of the housecarl.


This post has been edited by ghastley: Mar 11 2016, 02:54 PM