Post your mods, or post your favorite ones here!

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I made Followers can Relax.

This mod adds a command to any companion in the game that lets them chill out and relax instead of standing at attention all the time.

To do this, just talk to your companion and choose the topic "We'll stay here for a while." They will start interacting with the environment (eat, drink, sit, ect). To get them to start following you again, just talk to them and say "Let's go."

It can be DLed at Nexus here.

I plan on doing more with it as I have time to fix things and polish it. One bug that I've noticed in Breezehome is sometimes when Kharjo wanders into the little room in the back with the alchemy station he disappears. I recommend you know your follower's ID so you can console them back in case something like this happens until I figure out what the heck is happening there. Pretty sure that was a different mod and not mine now!

I cannot download anything from TES Nexus right now. Looks like their servers are having a coronary.

Does transitioning to a new zone, or fast traveling make Kharjo reappear? Often that does it when companions get lost.

I am currently working on a pair of mods to disable the main quest. I just finished one that disables it after Before the Storm (when you go to Whiterun and tell Jarl Balgruuf about the dragon attack on Helgen). The problem with this is that it ends with the Jarl standing next to the court wizard, and Irileth walking out to stand by the front gate. I am not sure if they will ever reset from those positions or not.

The other problem is that using this, you can never buy Breezehome or get Lydia as a follower. Right now my workaround for that is to manually type in a console command. For some reason whenever I try putting that command into the Before the Storm quest, it refuses to work.

Next up I am tinkering with a similar mod, that halts the MQ after doing Bleak Halls Barrow for Farengar. My thought with this, is that it could get you the option to buy Breezehome and get Lydia through the normal means. It is difficult, because you do not get Lydia and the option for Breezehome until after you kill your first dragon at the fort. So I have to tweak that quest to keep the dragon and fort scene from ever activating.

Aravi was able to leave Kharjo just outside of Jorrvaskr where the companions train and wander around Whiterun. She went inside of The Drunken Huntsman without Kharjo appearing. She went back to Jorrvaskr and he was still hanging around in the training area.

I have not tried leaving Whiterun or fast traveling. Someone commented that they will appear though.

I haven't had much time to play so I haven't personally done much with it yet.

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I would really like to use the mod you described to disable the MQ after giving the claw to Farengar. Would it cause the quest to not function even if you moved beyond that point? I'd like to use it for one character, but not Aravi. Would I have to be very careful about removing the mod each time I load Aravi?

These two mods will have no effect on your game if you have already progressed beyond those particular quests. They will only work with a game where you have not started the quests. Since Aravi has gone beyond those quests, so far as I can tell, you should be able to have it loaded with no effect on her game at all. Because she has already triggered the things that start the dragons spawning, and the civil war (there is a trigger for that in these quests too).

Keep in mind that I have been able to do very little testing, outside of making sure that the quests stop where I want them to and the rest of the MQ does not pick up. So I really do not know if there are any long-term effects they might case with other quests. I kept all the civil war triggers alive and still working, but there could be something else I missed. So really both these are a use at your own risk situation. If you want to be a beta tester, I can email you a copy once the Bleak Falls Barrow mod is done.

I have also been having a weird issue when doing these two mods. Somehow, something else in the game is getting modded, outside of the .esp files I am working on. I have had over half a dozen times where the MQ stops in Before the Storm, after first talking to the Jarl. Even though neither mod was loaded! It just happened to me again with the Bleak Falls Barrow mod, even though the Before the Storm quest is untouched in that .esp!

Looking at the Skyrim.esm in the creation kit showed no changes to it at all, as did the timestamp on the file. But the game had been changed somewhere. The only way I have been able to fix it is by restoring a full backup of my entire Skyrim folder. I have no idea why this is happening, or just what is being edited behind the scenes. It is probably only one or two files, but I have no idea which ones.

If you modified scripts (which I bet you have) look in /Data/Scripts. The modified scripts will be there, not included in the .esp (which I think is weird). You need to remove those scripts for the originals to unpack from the BSAs.

That tripped me up too when I was working on my mod.

Well that is idiotic! So if you download a mod that has scripting, that means that even after you remove the mod, its scripts are all still working! What genius at Bethesda thought that was brilliant? Probably the same one who thought it would be a great idea to make it impossible for people to fight underwater.

Does this mean I have to include those script files as well as the .esp when I distribute it? Or will the .esp alone generate the script files?

Edit: You have to include the script files, because the mod does not work by copying just the .esp to a fresh install of Skyrim. Furthermore, when I went back and looked at the .esp in the creation kit, all of the changes I had made to the quest had vanished. I suppose they designed it this way to dissuade people from making mods that use scripting?

Can I add a request for a mod? I've been looking around for one that adds a single wolf companion to the game, but I've only found a dog replacer, and it doesn't seem that good. I don't have the time at the moment to look through the Creation Kit wiki and learn how to use it, but Gladio would really like to find Ekali again.

So yeah, I need a mod that adds a single wolf companion to the game and doesn't simply replace all dogs. Though a texture different than the one on the standard wolf would be great, it's not important. Don't ask me why it's so important to have a wolf companion in the game, one reason is that I really want to incorporate him in the pictures, but otherwise I don't really know.

Well, I had another partial success on the Post Bleak Falls Barrow Disabler. I have the Main Quest cutting off after delivering the dragonstone to Farengar. The only issue I have there is that Delphine won't budge from where she is standing at Farengar's desk afterward.But I do not see that as a showstopper.

Once more, I cannot get the game to automatically make the character a Thane, deliver Lydia, and make Breezehome buyable. Again, a single console command can do this however. So while it is not ideal, it does work.

I do prefer this version over the one that disables the MQ earlier, after Before the Storm. It lets the character do more for the Jarl and Whiterun - thusly earning their keep - before they have the option of becoming a Thane. I suppose one upshot to having to use a console command for the latter is that you could hold off on that until you have done some of the bandit bounty quests for the steward. That would make it seem like you have earned it.

Saquira: A wolf companion is an excellent idea! I am surprised no one has come up with one yet. I have no idea how the companion scripts work. If I did, I would do it for you. But I am afraid I am completely in the dark as well. I might tinker around with it in the next few days, if I get the time though.

Congrats on the new mod! I certainly found such a command for followers quite immersively helpful in Oblivion. No one wants to go to bed and have their follower standing there watching them all night.

Daenlin is so funny. As soon as Buffy tells him to just hang out, he immediately takes off his shoes! I suspect that is because we have equipped him with pit boots (zero value). Then he looks for a place to sit down or starts chatting up the ladies.

@SubRosa: I have no idea why they decided to make the scripts separate. The only thing I can think of is with their Steam distribution method, every mod is turned into a .BSA.

@Saquira: I'd be willing to look into that too. It doesn't sound too difficult. Are you fine with the dog companion behavior? And I know nothing of texturing.

@Acadian: I bet you are right on the boots. He sounds like quite a character though!

Subrosa: I was surprised as well when I didn't find any wolf companion, it does seem like a quite easy thing to do. Compared to other mods anyway.

King Coin: The dog companion behavior is fine. Thank you.

Mod wish list: Player voice

I did some tinkering on the wolf companion last night had no success. I started with the wolf race, made a new race called wolf companion, then copied over all the entries from the dog companion race - including the script entry. The only things I left from the original wolf race were the models, textures, sounds, and animations. So it would still look and sound like a wolf.

But when I created a new actor and put it in the world, it was invisible. When I could find it, its' name showed up, but I could not interact with it. So it is back to the drawing board. I think I might try again just doing a straight copy of the dog race to start with. Then I'll manually change the models, textures, etc... Maybe doing it that way will work.

Edit: Okay, I did it the other way around, and I have a working companion. But it is a dog at the moment. I have to change the models, textures, etc... now to make it a wolf.

Saquira, was there any particular kind of wolf you wanted from the game? A regular wolf or Ice wolf? Any special color? If I still have 3ds Max around somewhere, I can probably assign a new texture to the mesh.

Edit Again: No luck. Once again, as soon as I change the models and textures, the wolf becomes invisible. I thought that extracting the files from the .bsas would do the trick, but it did not help. The companion script stops working too for some reason. I have no idea what it is doing this.

I'm kind of hoping for a Bound Dagger mod. My Illusionist/Conjurer made very nice work clearing out a bandit cave using Fury, Muffle and Bound Sword. At least until the Boss who was taken out by a good old stream of Frostbite. Though the downside of Bound weapons is I wouldn't be able to take advantage of the Assassin's Blade perk if/when I get it.

I made a mod that did work. I noticed that you can reanimate corpses, but you cannot actually summon undead. So I made a mod that lets you summon a skeleton. Meet Bone Jovi. I think I will keep working on this, and make a variety of skeletons, draugr, etc... that you can summon. Of course I will have to make another Witchcraft mod that lets you summon wolves, bears, spriggans, etc...

For some reason I cannot get vendors to sell things I create. I do all the same things you would in Oblivion: create a container, put it in the same cell as the vendor, make it owned by the vendor, etc... But the items never show up in the vendor's stock. I even checked to see that the things I am making have the same keywords as like objects, in case the vendors go by keyword. I also used one of the vendor's containers as a reference, and still no luck. In the most recent case, I copied an existing spell tome to create one for my conjured skeleton, so my version was exactly the same as the things the vendor was selling.

I tried the wolf for a little bit, and I got a wolf that was friendly to the player, but I could not get it to be interactive. Clicking on it did nothing. I'll have to fool around with it again at some other time. I suppose I could just try to put a follower AI package on it and see what happens, but I assume you'd like to be able to 'talk' to it. I don't know what I have to do to let you 'click' on it.

I was wrong about the wolf mod. The animal companion script was working. But as you can see the wolf is still invisible.

Do you have to make it a 'CompanionRace' to allow interaction? I just copied a wolf and changed it's AI and stats and tried to apply some scripts to it.

I copied the DogCompanionRace and made a new WolfCompanionRace. I think you might need a separate race. But I am not positive. All the dogs who are followers are a separate race, so I was just following what Bethesda did.

Then for the actual critter itself I copied the generic dog follower actor to make my actor. Everything worked fine until I changed its race from the DogCompanionRace to my new WolfCompanionRace. Then he turned invisible. Now if I change him to a regular wolf, he turns visible, but the companion script stops working. If I could figure out what is turning him invisible, the problem would be licked.

For the actor (not race) I was using a script called WEDogFollowerScript. It was simple, but worked

I saw that invisibly problem when I tried to preview my wolf in the CK. I started with the dog companion race as well.

Subrosa: Having taken a closer look at the different wolves, I think the Ice wolf texture wolf be best. But the standard one works just as well, so take whatever works best for you.

Thanks for working on it guys

I'd say SubRosa's going to complete the mod before I can.

What is the name of the wolf supposed to be? I just called it Wolf as a place holder name.

EDIT:

Also, I tried my mod out with leaving Kharjo in Whiterun and leaving the town, and then fast traveling. He stayed where he was told to hang around at in both instances.

King Coin: The wolfs name is Gladio.

Well, I pretty much finished my Undead Summoning mod. I created a Corrupted Shade, Draugr, and Draugr Lord you can summon. There is already a spell to summon a Dragon Priest, so I also made a tome for that as well.

All I have to do now is decide how to put the tomes in the game. Since I cannot get a merchant to sell them I am thinking I can either stick them in a dead body for the player to pick up, or add them to the leveled lists of the vendors. I would prefer you have to buy them, but don't like modding those lists, since it seems likely that other mods will do the same. I would rather avoid possible conflicts if I can.

On a side note, I came across an excellent idea for testing mods. Create a new interior cell that is just a big empty room. The first interior cell in the list is perfect to copy, as it is also for testing. Name it 1Test and put your modded stuff inside. Then start the game, open the console and type in coc 1test. That warps you to your testing room. Try you stuff out in there. That way you will not be making any edits to the world space until you decide exactly when and where you want to.

I got it!

The wolf companion that is. I figured out the invisibility problem. In the race entry, you have to set Morph Race and Armor Race to the same race as the original. After that, viola! there it is.

I just tested it and the ai is extremely basic. I guess this is the same as how the dog followers work in the game (I have never tried one, so do not know for certain). The first time you click on the wolf it becomes a follower. There is no on screen message to tell you that, which threw me before (it was working, but I never realized it!). After that the wolf will follow you wherever you go. If you draw a weapon, it will take an attack stance. If you go into combat, it helps. I made the wolf essential, so death will not be an issue.

I did not realize it earlier, but I had King Coin's follower mod on when I was doing some of my earlier testing. That is where that screen capture with the on screen text came from. The good thing about that, is we now know that the two mods work together. In fact, I highly recommend using KC's mod with this one, as it improves your ability to command Gladio.

Now on Skyrim Nexus

Good to know on Morph Race and Armor Race.

So what does a wolf do in wander mode?

Not much of anything. They don't seem to come with any AI packages, and I did not think to add any.

Thank you! I'll try it out tomorrow, have way to much to do at the moment.

I originally didn't intend on letting animals to be put into wander mode, but now that I think of it, my conditions wouldn't exclude animals from that dialog topic. When I update my mod I will make sure it works properly for animals. All I'd have to do is add an AI package to the animal alias.

Perhaps later on I'll make a separate topic for animals so that you don't address them the same way you would a person.

EDIT: Also that bug I mentioned about Kharjo disappearing, I'm pretty sure that was a different mod that was doing that and not mine. Woohoo!

I figured out how to make vendors work. Besides having to assign their container in their faction window, you have to add the JobMerchantFaction to their faction list. Such a great way to over-complicate things.

Does anyone know if there are any mod cleaners out there, like TES4Edit? I copied Farengar to make a new NPC, and now the CK is showing that Farengar was modded. Even though all I did was duplicate him. I tried the Validate Loaded Data option off the File Menu, but that did not do it.

There's a program called SkyEdit, but I don't know if it has the function you want.

I found a way to do it in the CK. Before you load an .esp, select the plugin, click on details, and you can delete the reference in the list that comes up. It made a copy of Farengar when I started it, but reverted the original Farengar to normal. Then I could delete the the copy normally.

Nice. It seems like the best way to find things is to just click on things and see what happens.

Bad news. Followers Can Relax is not working with Wolf Companion after all. FCR is on and running, but even after you tell Gladio to wait, he will come running after you once you move far enough away. So while the dialogue options to wait and follow are appearing on screen, they are not really working with animals.

Yeah, at first I didn't expect to allow animals to be told to wait so I never added the package to their alias. I didn't realize I didn't restrict the topics to people only however. In the next update I'll include the package for animals (which will be tomorrow or the day after).

If you are impatient, you can do it yourself by opening my mod in the CS and going to the DialogueFollower quest and clicking on aliases. Go to the animal one and add the FollowerWanderPackageA (I think that's what I called it) to its package list and make sure it's at the very top.

I can wait. I am not using the wolf companion myself (at least not yet, but he might be perfect for when I eventually play a Bosmer forester).

Do you, or anyone else, want to use my Main Quest Disabler? I am not planning to put it up on TES Nexus any time soon. Not with the things that still need work on it, like figuring out how to make Delphine go away, and triggering Breezehome and Lydia. But it does work for making a dragon-free game. I can email it to anyone who wants. Think of yourselves as beta-testers.

Right now I don't have a character set up to use it. Been playing Aravi!

I have some good news about the Main Quest Disabler. I have gotten the scripting working to automatically make you Thane of Whiterun after giving the dragonstone to Farengar. After you talk to Farengar, you will find Lydia waiting for you at the front door of Dragonsreach, and you can buy Breezehome.

The only issue I have left is Delphine refuses to budge from where she is leaning on Farengar's desk. It looks like she will spend the rest of the game there, instead of going back to Riverwood like normal. This means that you cannot rent a room at the Sleeping Giant Inn afterward, since she is the one you rent it from. Is that normal when you do the main quest though? I know Delphine is involved with a lot of the other quests, so I am guessing she never goes back to the inn to rent rooms?

Good news, this is fixed too. Delphine vanishes after you leave the cell. I never tried walking out of Dragonsreach and then back inside before. Renting a room at the inn was fixed when I modded Orgnar's status in the room rental faction from -1 to 0. I am guessing there is supposed to be a script in the MQ somewhere that does that, but I could not find it.

So it looks like the mod is ready for prime time. I'm renaming it to Dragons Disabled. I am going to try making it into a bsa from the CK, and see how that works. I am not sure if I want to post it on TESNexus after that, or if I want to play with it running for a while. Probably the latter. It will help find bugs. Does anyone want to volunteer to be a beta tester? I do not expect it to have any issues. But it would be nice to find out if I am wrong before hundreds of people download it.

I've had some success today. I have the new version of the mod created. Instead of using a preexisting quest and alias, I created my own quest and alias.

Now I need to test it with the multiple followers mod that everyone has been asking for compatibility with. With the way I have it set up now, I'm guessing that you will only be able to have one follower in wander mode.

I am not sure why, but now Delphine is not leaving Dragonsreach anymore. I am going to have to revisit the quest code again....

OTOH, I started a mod that lets you summon animals. I have wolves, ice wolves, snowy sabre cats, bears, snow bears, and spriggans. I created a test npc to sell the tomes and have that working as well. I am trying to make her a conjuration trainer, but for some reason cannot get that to work.

I also found that long-sleeved fur armor, and made a clothing version of it that you can create from a tanning rack.

While working on the undead and animal summoning mods, I found that the Familiars are seriously nerfed. They have the stats of a basic wolf (i.e. 2nd level creatures), but cost twice the amount of magicka to summon as a Flame Atronach (7th level creatures)! Somebody at Bethesda dramatically screwed up in assigning the cost. So I made a mod that makes them tougher, and reduces the cost to summon them.

Ok I finally have it working with the multiple followers mod. I had to go into the 'Details' section of my file and tell it to ignore 'DialogueFollower' quest even though I was not using it.

As I suspected though, you can only tell one follower to relax at a time. I'm going to have to think of a way to get it to work with more than one at a time.

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Can you upload the Familiar mod? I really like that spell, but have not used it because the wolf gets 1-shotted all the time.

Done, you can get it here

Grabbed it. Thanks.

My mod's been updated on nexus now. I don't know if it works with animals, but I don't see why it wouldn't.

I tried the updated Followers Can Relax. Sadly, it still does not work with my Wolf Companion. It gives you the on-screen prompt to talk to Gladio, but no actual dialog options, and nothing happens.

Good to know.

I'll make a new alias specifically for animals next.

Undead Summoning is now up on Skyrim Nexus. It brings back the good old days when you could just summon the walking dead from thin air, rather than need to corpses already laying around to reanimate. Included are skeletons, corrupted shades, draugr, draugr lords, and dragon priests.

The only issue I had with it is that the dark souls perk will not work with the summoned undead. The other perks do work however. I made a new dual summoning perk called Twin Summons that branches off of necromancy, so the player does not have to take dark souls just to get to the double summons perk.

Still working on the nature summoning mod. I now have it working so all of the atronach summoning perks work with the animals as well: Atromancy, Elemental Potency, etc... My question to the audience is would you prefer that, or an entirely new perk tree for animal summons? The downside I see to using the atronach tree is that the names of the perks kills some of the immersion for an animal summoner. The upside is that it has a smaller modding footprint, as it does not touch any of the existing perks. This way my mod should still work with others that alter the Conjuration perks. I am afraid if I create a new tree, then Nature Summoning will not work with other mods that rework magic. Because of that, right now I am leaning toward keeping it the way it is now, using the atromancer perks.

Using the atronach perks sounds like the best bet to me. Someone could then apply it to an existing character, and then there will be fewer perks that someone would split their character on. That's just my opinion though.

I haven't been able to work on my mod at all since I put up the last update. People seem to have more problems with the new version of my mod than the old one, which makes no sense to me. I created a new controlling quest that puts a new alias on your NPC follower instead of modifying the standard follower controlling quest. This is my first real mod though, so maybe there's something going on that I don't know about.

I was thinking that using the Atromancer perks would also help the player by forcing them to take fewer perks. So I think I will probably keep it this way.

The quests - and especially the scripts - in this game are a lot more complicated then they used to be in Oblivion. I cannot make heads or tails of most of how they work.

I decided to upload Nature Summoning. You can get it here. It allows you to summon Wolves, Ice Wolves, Bears, Snow Bears, Snowy Sabre Cats, and Spriggans. With the Elemental Potency perk, you will summon buffed versions of each.