If you're running it on PC, there's no need to. Just find a player mod house that you like. So long as it has all the crafting stations that you need for your character, and it doesn't add a house inside an established city, you're gold.

Vampire raids spawn when you enter the city's cell. This holds true for all cities, but the rate is much higher for walled cities like Whiterun and Solitude, which have their own dedicated cells. The ideal is to minimize your exposure to cities, to reduce the chances of vampire raids killing people, and, if possible, to be located near an unwalled city with a diverse assortment of vendors, to allow you to buy, sell, and trade with the minimum amount of risk of triggering an attack.

The two best unwalled cities in my own opinion are Dawnstar and Riverwood, because they have a large number of guards and have a variety of vendors. If you have Hearthfire, then my recommendation is Lakeview or Windstad Manor, due to their close proximity to the two. If you don't have it, or don't want it, then any mod that gives you a well stocked player house in their general vicinity is good.

---------- Post automerged Nov 25th, 2012 at 02:52 PM ---------- Previous post was Nov 24th, 2012 at 07:35 PM ----------

I feel the need to point out, since you seem to be a bit on the fence about Hearthfire, that there's more to it than just adding in houses. A fair number of 'misc' things are also included. The things I've seen since installing it include:

- New dialogue for various followers, such as Lydia

- A great many new items, ranging from general goods like straw bales, to toys and vanity items, to specific trading items like glass. Most of these are used in house construction, toys can be given to the children you adopt, and as a side effect of them existing, the general traders now actually look and feel like general traders.

The wooden sword toy is also a completely viable, if weak, weapon, with it's own stats and grindstone improvements, and you can totally run around and kill people with it if you feel like trolling the bandits even more than you already do.

- New items for alchemy and cooking, along with a large number of added recipes for cooking, some of which are simple, and some of which are quite complicated, but give large benefits, such as noticeable health and stamina regeneration over an extended period of time. Some examples include bags of flour, butter, and Mudcrab Legs. Some of the more 'exotic' food items that could not be readily created or bought, and only appeared on plates in specific locations like a Jarl's hall, can now be crafted via cooking. You can, for instance, now make Shepard's Pie and Sweetrolls.

- Some new random encounters have been added, such as roving bandit bands comprised of one-to-two Bandit Chiefs and between two and four regular Bandits, that can ambush you on the roads.

- The water retexture from the Game Jam is included in Hearthfire.

- A number of minor tweaks to the game, like more efficient bandit respawning, and characters who like you giving you gifts and tokens of their esteem more commonly, can do so multiple times, and the tokens are leveled to you.


So yeah, overall, I'd call it worth it. I definitely feel that I've gotten my five dollar's worth. Also, I can make baked crab legs with butter and clam chowder with garlic for dinner. And that's awesome.

 

Ill keep an eye for it to go on sale then. I just added around 40 more mods, and updated the 60 I have or so already. Going to to a total restart on my warrior mage. I know this time rushing blacksmithing and enchanting is nice, but game breaking, and I level so fast that I'm really good at wearing armor for a big boy, but running from stuff like a little girl.

Put in Total War, tons of monster mods, etc. Be interesting to see what the game is like this time.

 

I thumb'ed this post solely for this line of commentary.

 

Damn, and here I thought keeping updated on ten mods was a bloody hassle.

 

Well some of them could be minor retextures or fixes and such that individually don't amount to much. That's what makes up a large portion of my mod folder anyway, for TES and for the more recent Fallout games. I don't know if that's the case for Midknight's game of course, but ten or fifteen of those could equal one larger mod in terms of content.

 

Well slight exaggeration. I really did add 40, which yeah, minor stuff. Armor, new animals, etc. I did actually have around 40 installed already. Alot of them were bigger items, Thunder mod, massive retextures, civil war, etc.

 

I've been thinking about some of the things that are going to go into this DLC, and I'm curious as to how they're going to work. Namely, that flight is going to all but force them to make the overworld open cell, which is something that they were going to do originally, but could not, because it would overspec the consoles and basic PC requirements.

Now, Dragon Mounts are manageable. Just make it so you can only summon them in the Dragonborn-related areas, so the whole of Skyrim doesn't have to be made open cell, just like how only those two dragons in the Forgotten Vale ever actually swim and dive into the ice. Easy.

But they're bringing Levitation back into the game. That's not an area specific thing. That's a goddamn spell. And spells can be used anywhere.

Is this DLC going to make Skyrim Open Cell? It seems like a legitimate question to ask, partially because that's a big change in how the game works on a mechanical level, and partly because, if they do make everything Open Cell, that's going to be buggy as fuck.

I'm actually considering whether or not it would be worth it to wait to get this DLC until after the first patch for it appears. Because there's no way they're not going to have to patch it. I love Bethesda to death, but Dawnguard had game-breaking day-one bugs, and all it added was two castles and some vampires. If they Open Cell everything, I'm going to be surprised if I don't see Greybeards flying backwards through the forests hocking acid at things and making spider noises.

 

Off-topic:

So I was browsing Imgur and came across this album. The OP has a collection of his girlfriend's cosplay photos - whom he told should dress up as Aela the Huntress because she kind of looks like her.

You will not believe how right he was.

 

Mmmm...sideboob. Oh, and yeah, she really does look like Aela.

 

I've never had any problem with Skyrim or Oblivion, and I only really play on Xbox, so I couldn't use mods if I wanted to. They're certainly not unplayable.

 

It's just massively more enjoyable an experience to use mods once you've figured out what sort of character you like playing. For instance, I love playing sneaky assassin archers.

The gloves in Dark Brotherhood armorset double the damage of any sneak attacks done with melee weapons - I got a mod that made that particular perk also apply to bows as well.

Stuff like that can go a long way in making you able to play exactly the way you want to play the game.

 

No. While I've played Skyrim on a friend's PC, the actual version that I own right now is console, mainly because my computer is a hunk of crap.

While PC!Skyrim is definitely Best Skyrim, Console!Skyrim, a.k.a. Unmodded Skyrim, is far from unplayable.

It's not that it's not playable without mods. It's just that mods let you add monsters, put in or remove enemies, put more items and weapons in the game, add quests, improve the graphics and textures, add new areas and events to the game, make yourself and all the NPCs look better, and turn all of the dragons into Macho Man Randy Savage. And really, why would you not want that?

[EDIT]

What witch am I going to have to kill to stop these font shenanigans at the source?

[EDIT]

COUNTERSPELL! NATURAL TWENTY!

 

Well, you could use the default Verdana font rather than... Calibri, is it?

If you can't figure it out, just manually wrap everything in [FONT][/FONT] tags and set .

Don't kill the witches! We like witches.

 

Or click the little A/a button in the top right of the reply/edit screen and remove the font tags that are making it Verdana.

 

Some of the Beta-Testers have talked. Good News Bad News Time.

Bad News:

- Levitation is not in the game.

- Neither are spears.

Good News:

- Dragon Aspect is a once a day power that lets you go Dovakiin Super Saiyan. All of your Shouts become stronger, your shout cooldowns are drastically reduced to the point that you can quasi-spam them in combat, and you have a dragon ghost overlapping your character while it's activated.

- There is a pack of NPC werewolves that can be found and conversed with. They are, allegedly, not assholes.

- Like magic staffs, but hate that all the good ones that make things explode or turn invisible have to be found with luck of the draw? Now you can make your own using Enchanting.

- MORAG TONG SIGHTINGS CONFIRMED. MOTHERFUCKING NINJAS ALL UP IN THIS BITCH. I don't even care if there are no quests associated with them. I will kill one, take their armor, and be a magical steampunk ninja for the rest of the goddamn game.

- The bare mechanics of the skill tweaking you can do in Apocrypha has been confirmed. Basically, it works like Paarthurnax's meditations. There are multiple choices, you can only have one active at a time, and you can go back and change them whenever you want.

- Remember how, in the Game Jam, they showed off, just for giggles, Werebears? Remember how they were all like "become a bear! Gain a bum rush attack to run people the fuck over with, knocking them out of the way!" And we were all like "ha, nice, that would actually be kind of funny?"

Guess what some Beta Testers have claimed to have bumped into in the wilds of Solstheim?



Yeah. Basically, how it stands now, we have no confirmed confirmation of this, but it might actually be a thing.


On Stalthrim and the mechanics of dragon riding (is it limited to Solstheim? Can we ride dragons on the mainland?), there has been nothing but silence. Some of the core details are being kept secret until the release of the DLC. And I would recommend that everyone treat all of the above with caution. Some of them, like the staff creation and the Morag Tong, have been definatively confirmed to an extent. Other things, though, are details we are taking the beta testers word on, and I'm not a fan of hearsay. Grain of salt, and all that.

---------- Post automerged at 03:58 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:56 PM ----------

Also, there is a new type of Dwemer enemy. It's a completely non-humanoid construct that essencially looks like a ballista with legs.

---------- Post automerged at 07:47 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:58 PM ----------

Basically, there's been a massive leak from one of the Beta Testers. He's providing data dumps of pictures and information about the DLC, including massive spoilers. I've been avoiding it, because I don't want to be spoiled, but I've got the link in case any of you are interested, and can post it if prompted. I will not follow, but I can show you the way.

Some more non-spoiler details, for those of you like me. If you, however, do not want any further details, stop reading here.



This buffer space is a gift, so you don't accidentally see things that cannot be unseen. Details end where the quotebox ends.

List of new spells and enchantments incoming. Stay tuned for more details.

---------- Post automerged at 07:57 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:47 PM ----------

A quick update on the Werebear situation. Still no confirmation, no screenshots. However, the word that's going around is that PCs cannot actually become a Werebear. Werebears will simply appear as extremely high level enemies in the wilderness, and are designed to present a decent challenge to capped-to-nearly-capped PCs, and be walking death to anyone of a lower level. This is, however, merely a rumor. Grains of salt all around.

---------- Post automerged at 08:19 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:57 PM ----------

Right, new spells. Most of these are confirmed, and will be boxed for those of you who don't want to know. After that, some more generic details about the setting and situation on the island, which most people probably don't care about but lore whores (like myself) do. I'll box these in quotes too, just to make sure nobody accidentally sees something they don't want to.


Buffer zooone~

- More information on the Mora skill tweaking:

---------- Post automerged at 09:36 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:19 PM ----------

The current situation on Solstheim is as follows. Again, I'm avoiding the big spoilers like the plague, but this should clarify some questions that have been raised.


DAT GREENSPACE

And last, but not least:


- Big Space, because ALLCAPS-

Somewhere in the vast cosmic gulf of this space, Wheatley can be found.



Here are some screenshots. I'm making them links via my Photobucket, so again, people who don't want to be spoiled won't be. Note that these are not official screen shots. You can find those yourself using google. These are shots taken by the Beta leaker.

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3

Picture 4


And finally, some general, nonspoiler-ey information about the DLC itself.

- Solstheim is an area slightly larger than The Reach. It will have it's own independent map, which is a godsend after the geographical clusterfuck that was the Soul Cairn.

- The Beta Testers are all roughly 30+ hours in, and they still aren't close to finishing. The Beta Tester who is doing the leaks has said that you could "probably rush through the core quests in about 10 hours if you wanted to."

- The full map of Solstheim looks like this:

Full Map Aerial

Note that this is an official screenshot, so there's nothing spoiler-ey about it. It's still a link, however, because it's the size of an Xbox Deathstar, and the anal circumference of the post can't handle firepower of that magnitude without breaking.

- While you don't have to beat the game to play this DLC, it does contain a fair amount of high level content, and some of the dialogue from a number of characters, including the Elder Dovakiin, changes if you have already defeated Alduin and seen the 'official' end of the main game.

- The Beta Tester who leaked all of this information said that his reasoning was because he felt that Bethesda was being "extremely stingy" with the details of the DLC, and that he doesn't believe people will buy something they don't know anything about. He leaked what he felt would be "decision-making information, the sort of thing that would make people decide that they wanted this," and that he believes this is not only one of the largest DLCs Bethesda has ever released, but that it is also one of the best they have ever made for any of their games.


And that's all for now. I'll give the Frankenpost a rest. Off to continue grinding up my Battlemage. If anything new comes up, I'll post about it, assuming no one beats me to it.


[EDIT]

Oh, and the link. WARNING: MASSIVE GODDAMN SPOILERS AHEAD. This contains everything I've already told you, plus spoilers for the story, plot, locations, NPCs, and a bunch of other things that you may not want to see. I've tried to protect the fragility of the spoiler in my Frankenpost, because once lost, the joyous sense of wonder that is discovery can never truly be recaptured. However, if you follow this link, and the links within this link, you will be spoiled. Even all of the things I have posted thus far are, primarily, generic details that aren't really 'that' spoilery.

What follows is.

There are specific details ahead.

You have been warned.

The Link

 

Help. I'm dying of blood deprivation to my brain.

 

I'd like a take a moment to remind everyone that we need to take this information with a grain of salt. Strictly speaking, only a limited number of things in the leak are actually confirmed and/or corroborated. The vast majority of it is not. It is still possible, even if it's unlikely, that we're being trolled.

As such, I retain a dose of skepticism for all of this until I see it for myself, and I'd recommend that others try to do so as well.

That being said, if even half of the things in the leak are true, I'm going to love this DLC in an overtly sexual manner. I mean holy shit guys. Cyclone shouts, "I cast Dominate on the Dragon," steampunk ninja gear. Finally some decent goddamn robes to replace that shitty Archmage poncho.

My body is ready.

---------- Post automerged Dec 4th, 2012 at 01:37 AM ---------- Previous post was Dec 3rd, 2012 at 07:51 PM ----------

I had a thought. Dragonborn is, allegedly, adding in a pack of nonhostile NPC werewolves.

Did you stop to consider why? I mean, besides that it's cool.

As it stands now, you can become a vampire whenever you want by fighting vampires. And, until and unless you convince Serana to become a human, you can use her to become a Vampire Lord whenever and as many times as you want.

But you can currently become a Werewolf once, and only once, ever, which is obviously your initiation to the Inner Circle of the Companions. If you become a Vampire Lord and then get cured, you can go back to it whenever you want. If you get cured as a Werewolf, or overwrite your Werewolfism by becoming a Vampire Lord, that's it. You're done. No more Werewolf.

What if that NPC pack of Werewolves is going to provide the 'service' of turning you into a Werewolf whenever you want? Like, they're initially wary, you earn their trust, and then they decide to accept you into their pack by making you one of them? And you could keep going back whenever you wanted to keep becoming a Werewolf?

Just a thought. It would make sense, considering the current imbalance between Vampirism and Lycanthropy in the metagame.

Though it does make me wonder what the Companions will say if you show up and join, and you're already a Werewolf? Would their dialogue change to reflect that?

Just some food for thought.

---------- Post automerged at 11:29 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:37 AM ----------

It dropped a day early. Get it.

And enjoy it too, you assholes. I have to go to work. ; ;

 

Damn it, not out here yet. Guess I'll have to wait a day for it.

 

It just dropped for me on the East Coast of the U.S. I just can't enjoy it, because I'm literally heading out the door. I'm leaving it downloading so it'll be here when I get back from work.

---------- Post automerged at 12:42 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:36 AM ----------

As it turns out, I read my schedule wrong. I have a few hours until I work.

Random bandits in Skyrim itself can now have Carved Armor on them. I just killed one, and holy shit but it looks amazing. I want to rub it against my body.

Why the fuck is anybody using regular steel when this is an option?

---------- Post automerged at 12:47 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:42 PM ----------

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

This place isn't using Skyrim music. This is remixed Morrowind music.

All. Of my. Yes.

---------- Post automerged at 01:01 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:47 PM ----------

Bonemold and Chitin are high-mid-tier quality, and the Chitin Helmet comes complete with the classic Morrowind steampunk goggles and scarf.

Hell yes. Hell yes hell yes hell yes. Also, chitin plates and Netch leather are new smithing materials. And the Carved Nord weapons are even sexier than Carved Nord armor, if you can believe that.

---------- Post automerged at 01:03 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:01 PM ----------

And the Beta Testers were wrong. This island is a lot bigger than The Reach. Holy shit this place is huge. It's more like Whiterun Hold plus the Pale and about half the Rift as well. Goddamn that's a lot of new ground.