Adjust spawn chance of item in leveled list?

[miketheratguy]

Hey guys, I'm learning to use the CK (just a little) and have figured out how to add items to leveled lists. Basically, I'm adding a bunch of custom armors to various armor lists in the game. A new cuirass in the hide cuirass list, a new gauntlet in the iron gauntlet list, etc. In this manner the new items will randomly appear in place of the vanilla armor pieces, whether it's in treasure chests, merchant stock, or worn by enemy bandits. This is exactly what I wanted to do.

 

However I don't yet understand how to adjust the chance of each custom piece appearing, other than adding more (or less) instances of that item in the list that I added it to.

 

For example let's say that I want the "Rad Armor" set to appear in my game. Not all at once, just a piece here and a piece there. Maybe in an hour of play I'll run across a bandit wearing Rad gauntlets and three hours later I'll see a Rad helmet for sale. I do this by opening the hide armor lists and throwing the Rad armor pieces into them. So far so good. They randomly appear in my game as expected. But maybe they hardly ever show up at all - I'm ten hours into the game and I've only seen the Rad cuirass once. So, to improve my chances of seeing the Rad Cuirass, I open up the CK, fire up the hide cuirass list, and make it look like so:

 

Hide cuirass

Rad cuirass

Rad cuirass

Rad cuirass

 

I've now given the Rad cuirass a 75% chance to spawn instead of a hide cuirass. But what if I have something like Tera Armors, which adds 64 sets of armor to the game? If I add all 64 of those new cuirasses into a leveled list, don't I then have to have 64 instances of vanilla armor in that same list JUST to make things 50/50? What if I want the Tera Armors to be much more rare, like maybe showing up just 5 percent of the time?

 

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TL;DR: I can add custom armors to leveled lists so that they're worn by enemy NPCs and found in chests and merchant inventory, but I don't know how to easily dictate how frequently (or rarely) those armors will show up.

 

Can anyone help?

[Varithina]

If you open the leveled list up, and then select the armour pieces you added you will notice just under the armorid there is a chance to none option, this is normally at 0, which as far as I am aware means there is no chance that this item will not be used, if you change that on the armour pieces you are adding to something like 75, that should give them a 75% chance to not be used in that check so to speak, though this may sometimes end up with npc's who are nake or do not have the equipment they should. It might be worth while playing around with those values for the armour you are adding to the npc/random loot

 

You could also take a look at Lootification http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/32339/? if you have not done so already, as this will add the armours to npc/vendor lists as well as add enchanted versions to those leveled lists as well, though it can be a bit fiddley to get going, and and even bigger pain if you have a large load list of armor/weapons, though you could limit which mods it works on using its patchers options.

[miketheratguy]

Thanks for the reply. I did try messing with the "chance none" option until I realized the same thing that you said, which is that raising it not only lessened the chance of the NPC wearing the custom armor, it lessened the chance of the NPC wearing any armor at all. This was a disappointing feature (that's purpose I frankly don't really understand) because having a bunch of naked enemies running around seems like a total immersion-breaker.

 

I've also given a lot of thought to Lootification since it pops up constantly during the various searches that I've done for this subject. It's not at all that I'm against using it, but rather I fear that it's a bit over my head. I've only just begun to get my toes wet with the CK (and the tiniest flirtations with Wrye Bash) so when that mod says "Hey, all you do is click a few buttons and you've got a custom armor list" but then turns around and starts talking about creating XML files and running jars it's like someone who suddenly starts talking to me in a foreign language. I'm also a wee bit concerned that it says each added armor retains its rarity, since some of the armor I've been trying to add shows up CONSTANTLY unless I bombard the leveled list with instances of vanilla armor to counter it.

 

I HAVE had a lot of success with a mod called "Modded Loot" (http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/64778/?) which adds a script that finds and activates any custom armor esp that you tell it to, then applies that armor randomly to NPCs through a dynamic script. It's utterly straightforward and lets you easily adjust percentages through an MCM script. My only concerns about that are the fact that it seems like instability could be caused by adding mods in the future (thus messing up its esp locating) and, more than that, when the mod runs I get a lot of errors in an additem script that says "array -1 is out of range" which seems like a crash-prone type of thing (you wouldn't happen to know any additional information about such an error, would you?)

 

Anyway this is all why I thought that it would be easier to simply "tell" the CK, or TES5Edit, or whatever, a simple percentage number to dictate how often I'd like to see the armor show up in the game. It seems that something like this surely has to exist, you know?

[Varithina]

Just changing the chance for that piece of armour is what you would assume that value would do, but we all know just how odd the ck and skyrim can be like after all.

 

Lootification is easy to use, unless something goes wrong then it can be a major pain to sort out, especially if you want tiered outfits, something I never use as they are a pain to get working.  Though large load orders of armour/weapons mods or large mod packs of armour can make it somewhat a problem, mostly its due to the fact that if you are using skyproc patchers under mod organiser, you can only use 32bit java.  If however you use nmm, you could use 64bit java which would sort out a lot of problems with out of memory on large mods.

 

If you do use mod organiser, create a new profile that's just a copy of the one you are using now but named something else, then add lootification and have a play around with it, it can not hurt after all.  I do use it but my load list is too big on armor/clothing/jewellery mods so it now will not work, but I am currently working on a work around for that but not sure if it will work or not.

[miketheratguy]

"Just changing the chance for that piece of armour is what you would assume that value would do, but we all know just how odd the ck and skyrim can be like after all."  Yeah, you pretty much narrated my experience with the "chance none" setting.

 

I'm really on the fence about Lootification because it seems like by trying to automate the process it's ironically just going to make things more complicated. I use NMM (can't even remember which version of Java I have installed, I could have sworn that I've had to install both at some point), have several dozen armor mods, a few of which have a dozen or more pieces (Tera alone has to have something like 100 or more) and I've read conflicting comments about how finicky or buggy Lootification can be  -someone even said somethng about making sure not to overlap merged and bashed patches and something else about keeping leveled lists independent and another thing about "Null keyword errors" and it makes me think "But....       ......can I just adjust how often custom armor appears?"

 

I hate how needlessly over-complicated doing anything to Skyrim is. Anyway I am about to give Lootification a tentative try to see how it works.

[Varithina]

No it will not allow you to set how rare custom armour is it simply adds them to suitable leveled lists based on the armours keywords assigned by the esp for them, this can be a big problem as you sometimes get armour that is as good as dragonplate or dragonscale but flagged as fur or iron, in which case it will spawn on low level npc's who can be equipped with iron or what ever armour type it is flagged as same goes for weapons, its the keywords in the mod, though you can usually change it in the patcher.

 

If however you get the out of order message on a mod, start up the ck, and see if the esp adding the armour is flagged as having update as one of its masters if it dose not then add update as a master by checking the tick-box next to update in the select files for the ck, then set the armour mod to active let it all load then force a save on the armour esp, in 9 out of 10 instances for me that sorts the problem out.

 

To be honest for lootification to work properly you mostly need to re-edit the armour esp to make sure there are meshes attached to the male armour as well as the female one, as a lot of player mods do not bother, you can just use the vanilla game meshes as they will then use the male vanilla armour, you would also want to make sure the keywords, light/heavy armour and gloves/feet  and the material fur/leather/orcish all match what you want them to be, which is more tedious than anything, though a few armour mods add it for you some do not, you can just use it out of the box though and it will work though it may be somewhat inconsistent depending on how the creator has set up the keywords for their armour.

 

It is however worth playing around with after all if it dose not work you can just deactivate the lli.esp and its sorted.

[miketheratguy]

In between your replies I have Lootification a try and, so far at least (in my very short, very early, very basic preliminary test), it seems promising. At least as far as getting the custom armor mods into the game. I still don't know how anyone manages to adjust the rarity of the stuff that they add to leveled lists.

 

With the exception, perhaps, of setting each piece to a vanilla armor that's more rare by default, which I guess is kind of a workaround. I personally want all of the armor that I add to the game to be available at any level, so for that reason I don't care if something is supposed to be Daedric but is assigned to fur. However by assigning it to Daedric it WOULD make the armor much more rare, which is good, but then I'd have to wait until level 40 (or whatever) for it to even have a single chance of appearing, which isn't what I want. I guess I'll spend a little time looking at Lootification to see what kind of things are possible with it. I guess I may still have to edit the .esps to include a bunch of extra instances of vanilla armors to make the custom stuff more rare, but if I go back to doing that then I'm back at square one and Lootification kind of becomes redundant (except for the enchantments, which are nice but secondary to what I'm trying to achieve).

 

You lost me at the part about editing the armor so that it's attached to both male and female armors. And this keyword stuff is a completely foreign concept to me, I've never heard about it before today and have no idea what it's even referring to. I guess I'll just ask directly: I have a bunch of armor mods that are male only or female only and do not have meshes for both sexes, other than a generic vanilla mesh (for example a female custom armor will appear as leather or Nightingale armor when equipped on a male). If I leave this stuff alone without doing some kind of .esp keyword nonsense it will interfere with the functionality of Lootification?

[Varithina]

You lost me at the part about editing the armor so that it's attached to both male and female armors. And this keyword stuff is a completely foreign concept to me, I've never heard about it before today and have no idea what it's even referring to. I guess I'll just ask directly: I have a bunch of armor mods that are male only or female only and do not have meshes for both sexes, other than a generic vanilla mesh (for example a female custom armor will appear as leather or Nightingale armor when equipped on a male). If I leave this stuff alone without doing some kind of .esp keyword nonsense it will interfere with the functionality of Lootification?

 

That is what I was on about with the meshes not being there, some player made armours do no add them for the opposite gender the armor is made for, so when lootification or some other mod adds these armours you get either an invisible torso, or a body with the torso or other part from the opposite gender.

 

An easy way to check is to load the mod esp into ck, then find the armour piece, roughly in the middle bottom is a box called models, in there will be something like bladehelmetkhajit for example, double click on that to pull up the models details, on the left side of that pane you will have two boxes one saying male an the other a bit lower down will say female, if the biped model is empty it means there is no meshes vanilla or otherwise attached to that armor for the npc/player to wear for that gender.  Sometime it will be the same mesh for both genders.

[miketheratguy]

Oh okay, so it won't actually crash the game or cause some kind of crazy conflicts or anything, it will simply give the occasional instance of invisible body parts. That's fine, if that's the worst that it gets then I can live with that for now as I try to learn more about Lootification. If my good luck continues with it though, I'll probably look into my mods and do the adjustments that you recommend (thanks for that, by the way).

 

I've done a bunch of tests with Lootification in the meantime and to be honest, I think I'm really getting the hang of it. I don't know why so many people spoke of it being complicated - either they were even more inexperienced with this kind of stuff than I am or the mod has really improved and become much easier over time, because I found it to be really rather simple. Make a merged patch, run the patcher, set the armor groups and patch. After some practice runs with a handful of armor mods I sat down and tried throwing my whole collection at the patcher (something like 60-70 armor mods). I was playing in like ten minutes.

 

For my needs, the good news is that Lootification seems to override or otherwise undo the erratic and unpredictable armor frequency issues that I was experiencing when editing the leveled lists myself in the CK. For example a couple of my armor sets seemed to really dominate, showing up on probably 6 out of every 30 bandits whereas another set would show up maybe once every 50 or 60. Lootification seems to put everything on a level playing field and truly randomizes the custom selections. The bad news is that I'm still not aware of any way to make the armor that does show up any more rare than it was before: If I spawn ten bandits I'd say at least four or five of them will be wearing something unique, I'd rather it be one or perhaps two at most. And now, a bunch of the armor will be enchanted as well (at least I'm assuming it will - so far I've only seen the enchantments applied to merchant customs, not bandit customs, so I don't know. Either way I think I'm going to be drowning in expensive loot, which is something that I'd still like to adjust if I can.

 

All that aside, I have to admit that I'm surprised. So far I'm really liking how Lootification is working, and how easy it turned out to be to use.

[Varithina]

 

For my needs, the good news is that Lootification seems to override or otherwise undo the erratic and unpredictable armor frequency issues that I was experiencing when editing the leveled lists myself in the CK. For example a couple of my armor sets seemed to really dominate, showing up on probably 6 out of every 30 bandits whereas another set would show up maybe once every 50 or 60. Lootification seems to put everything on a level playing field and truly randomizes the custom selections. The bad news is that I'm still not aware of any way to make the armor that does show up any more rare than it was before: If I spawn ten bandits I'd say at least four or five of them will be wearing something unique, I'd rather it be one or perhaps two at most. And now, a bunch of the armor will be enchanted as well (at least I'm assuming it will - so far I've only seen the enchantments applied to merchant customs, not bandit customs, so I don't know. Either way I think I'm going to be drowning in expensive loot, which is something that I'd still like to adjust if I can.

 

All that aside, I have to admit that I'm surprised. So far I'm really liking how Lootification is working, and how easy it turned out to be to use.

 

From what I am aware that's the way lootification works, either no problems or if you do have them you end up tearing your hair out in frustration.

 

As for the chance for armour I think the only way to do that with any consistency would be to create a new leveled list for each armour type, fur, leather, iron etc, called something like customFur or such, then add all the armours that are fur into that, then add that to the light armour leveled lists where fur is, and put a chance on that, it did work for obivion but I am not too sure if it would work for skyrim, from what you did I would guess no as the chance for does not seem to work properly.

 

And finding npc's wearing the custom armour rather than vanilla makes sense when you think about, you added say 10 new armours that are classed as fur, that means there is in effect 1 in 10 chance of getting the vanilla fur armour and a 9 in 10 chance of getting one of the new armours you added, and that would be calculated for each npc wearing fur or leather or which ever, do not forget most player made armour tends to be either fur/leather occasionaly elven then they tend to jump to dragonscale, heavy tends to be either iron or steel, occasionally ebony/orcish and dragonplate.

 

As for the enchanted stuff, thats what the mod does it creates enchanted versions of all the armour you have added through lootification, though you should only get enchanted armour as often as you did before, because it adds them to the same enchated item lists as vanilla game is, so they should not be that much more common, if its getting too much then it might be worth while looking at this mod http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/49496/? It allows you to choose how much loot you get I use the 2x version for both vendors and loot, there are 3 esp's for it the base version plus one that affects loot and another that affects vendors.

[miketheratguy]

"From what I am aware that's the way lootification works, either no problems or if you do have them you end up tearing your hair out in frustration."   Oh, so Skyrim, then.

 

 

I did another test run last night that wound up turning into 7 straight hours of gameplay, something that I haven't been able to enjoy in a very, very long time. This meant that my settings were working and apparently nothing was wrong or glitched or prone to crashing. I'll take it.

 

I'm now comfortably familiar with Lootification and how it works and while it's not perfect and there are things about it that I wish I could change (namely that armor rarity / frequency that started all this) I'm happy with it overall and think that it's probably what I'll stick with in terms of getting custom loot into my game. The more straightforward and flexible mod I used before, Modded Loot, ran a constant script which threw up frequent additem errors and I think sometimes crashed my game. Using the CK to edit every armor piece into custom lists myself was a task that took hours and likely caused problems of its own (I never felt comfortable adding loads of instances of vanilla armor to counteract the common distribution of the custom armor, surely that added even more to the game's load). Lootification, meanwhile, doesn't give me any control over armor rarity which means that I see custom stuff on probably 50-60% of enemies, which is way too much, and it does indeed seem to give odd weight to some pieces over others (certain pieces of the Tera armor set, for example, show up dozens of times whereas other pieces from the same mod haven't shown up once, despite my setting each of them to the iron group).

 

Still, everything else about it is pretty satisfying. As I mentioned before it takes perhaps ten minutes to set it up and get hundreds of new pieces into the game. I'm coming to enjoy the fact that the enchanted stuff is generally reserved to chests and merchants because it doesn't leave me too overpowered (and, like you said, is basically how the vanilla game handles it). While it sucks that the armor distribution doesn't seem 100% random I do seem to find new pieces here and there all the time, which is the fresh unpredictability that I was going for. I suppose I can live with the fact that the mod prefers some pieces and offers them much more than others. I'm starting to basically look at those more common pieces as just another vanilla set: Yes, I'll see them everywhere, but I'm still getting seemingly random shots at other, more uncommon pieces throughout my adventures. That's basically what I wanted to begin with.

 

So in short, I want to thank you for urging me to check out Lootification. The mod's always been there, and I ran across it dozens of times throughout my searches, but I never wanted to mess with it. I guess your description just made me think that it was worth a try, and it would seem as if you were correct!