Understanding Levelled Lists

[Deadmano]

Hey Guys,

 

So I've been patching my Skyrim and its assortment of 200+ mods for almost a year now, 6 months of which I spent hand-picking and replacing textures to cover roughly 90% of the game...

 

In that time I've been forced to understand how conflict resolution works, and even managed to put something together for Fallout 3.

 

Enter @Hishutup bringing me up to speed with Mator's Smash, and my life got a thousand times easier...

 

Anyway, I'm drifting off of topic already, sigh...

 

I'm trying to do the somewhat impossible, by having Requiem as my core, and patching every mod I use to be compatible/resolving incompatibilities as I go along.

 

One thing I have never figured out, as of yet, is how levelled lists work. My basic understanding from simply looking at them, is that each record that has the "level" sub-record refers to the players record, right? So if you have several at level 1, those items or those NPCs will appear from level 1, right? So others marked at level 10, they will only appear from level 10 onwards? What happens to the level 1 ones, do they stay throughout but now get mixed with the level 10s?

 

Am I wrong in assuming that chests/loots etc. pull the levelled lists in to decide what will be given to the player, much the same encounter zones randomly pull mobs from the lists?

 

Once I can understand this, I can hopefully understand what to do with Skyrim's Monster Mod. It has many leveled NPC records for its NPCs that it adds, ranging from level 1 to around level 70.

 

From what I've seen, Requiem takes all the NPC levels and delevels them (sets them to level 1).

 

HOWEVER, if I simply went and set all the leveled NPCs of Monster Mod to 1, wouldn't that mean all the high-end mobs would get a chance to spawn, which are basically insanely OP? Or is there something I am missing here?

 

Obviously that is what makes Requiem stand out, in that you will get areas that have mobs with a percentage chance of being a higher level than you, which just means you go level somewhere else, return and kick their ass, but if I keep doing this for ALL the leveled NPC lists, chances are the entire region will be covered with unbeatable mobs...

 

So yeah, sorry about that, quite a mouthful! I guess I too am trying to grasp what exactly I'm looking for here, though it could just be the fatigue of yet another day of several hours of patching, which seems to be never-ending...

 

I already have thousands of records amongst a hundred or so mods, so hopefully when I am finished I can replace my "mega patch" which may help others who use the same mods I do, or at least prove to be a decent reference for their own conflict resolution endeavours.

[TechAngel85]

Your thinking is correct. Anything leveled will spawn enemies or loot according to the player's level. This means you can enter a dungeon at level 5 to see lower level enemies and receive lower level loot. Entering the same dungeon at level 50 will spawn different, harder enemies and better loot because of the player level.

[zilav]

Loot on NPCs comes from 3 sources together:

1) Inventory of NPC (a list of items and/or leveled lists)

2) Outfit of NPC (a list of items and/or leveled lists)

3) Death Item of NPC (a single leveled list)

Edited May 4, 2016 by zilav

[Deadmano]

Wowee, TechAngel and Zilav himself?!   I've truly struck GOLD!

 

Thank you both for confirming my thoughts.

 

Am I also right in assuming that the more lower level (albeit duplicate NPC references) you have in a leveled list, the more likely that specific NPC will spawn? So in a sense, one could still allow for the higher level (60, 70, 80) spawns, but dot the list with many level 1 - 20 mobs?

 

Further, how would you approach this same situation, taking into consideration Requiem's deleveled world?

 

See this image:

 

 

A prior requiem patch for SiC changed 40-70 spawn levels to 30 each. But isn't that against the whole deleveled Requiem vibe? Or is this done to prevent OP spawns, whilst giving a challenge from level 30+ onwards? If I went and changed all that to level 1, I'm assuming things would be a whole lot harder, and potentially unplayable?

 

Hopefully I can understand this better to make the most out of the monster/NPC mods I've got going, to play along with Requiem.

 

Bonus question: I'm assuming the Skyproc (if anything like Skyre's one) for Requiem basically tries to resolve conflicts whilst also tagging weapons/armours and adding any stats/re-balancing them, which aside from the latter is what I'm actually doing with the conflict resolution? So leaving my "mega patch" in for the SkyProc phase I'm basically helping out to make the process easier as I've already manually cleaned up conflicts with many NPC/Leveled/Weapons/Armor records?

 

Edit: I see that this mod may be able to shed some light on how I can go about creating the desired effect.

Edited May 4, 2016 by Deadmano

[Kelmych]

The mod you reference sounds like it might provide (or intend to provide) gameplay similiar to what Oscuros Oblivion Overhaul did for TES4. I felt the vanilla TES4 NPC leveling made little sense.; there were even forum threads about how to complete Oblivion while remaining at level 1. OOO didn't completely remove NPC leveling, but for each NPC type it was changed to a fairly narrow range (e.g., 20-30 or 40-50) and NPCs would randomly have a level in this range.

[Deadmano]

The mod you reference sounds like it might provide (or intend to provide) gameplay similiar to what Oscuros Oblivion Overhaul did for TES4. I felt the vanilla TES4 NPC leveling made little sense.; there were even forum threads about how to complete Oblivion while remaining at level 1. OOO didn't completely remove NPC leveling, but for each NPC type it was changed to a fairly narrow range (e.g., 20-30 or 40-50) and NPCs would randomly have a level in this range.

Jeez, I remember how terrible Oblivion was in that regard!! That, and the fact that only when I was half-way through the game did I realise that SLEEPING in a bed was the only time you were shown the level-up screen, of which I then levelled 15-20 levels at once!

 

What I'm hoping to find out here, is a bit more concrete information as to how one can go about making a delevelled world, but without making it impossible for player progression. What I'm thinking is, you would need to keep some key locations (perhaps around the starting area near Helgen/Riverwood/Whiterun) that has a max spawn level between 1 and 10, that way you have a chance to level up, but the rest of the world is super challenging.

 

Does anyone here perhaps know exactly how one could control the spawn points as mentioned? Near Riverwood/around Whiterun? As the leveled lists seem rather generic? There is a "LCharAnimalHills" which I would assume is around Whiterun, but could extend to other regions?