Skill Points, a mod for TES4: Oblivion

Introduction

Get Skill Points upon completing quests and discovering new locations, or find them around Cyrodiil in containers such as boss chests. Equip your Skill Ring to activate the Skill Points menu, and spend your points to level up the skills of your choosing.

NOTICE: This Skill Points v0.3 release is an early testing version. Please be aware that this mod is still being tested, and may yet contain significant bugs.

Downloads

Skill Points is also available on the Oblivion Nexus.

Installation

Skill Points requires OBSE version 20 or higher.

It is safe to add Skill Points to an existing save. Existing characters will get an initial bonus of Skill Points based on information like the number of quests completed and locations discovered so far. This will be the same amount of Skill Points as that character would have earned naturally if the mod had been enabled from the beginning. Don't want the bonus? Skill Points are represented as items in your inventory, so you can just drop them off anywhere.

To install Skill Points, copy the Data folder in the downloaded archive to your Oblivion directory. (Or, of course, you can have a mod manager do it for you.)

The main plugin file is SkillPoints.esp. This file is required to enable Skill Points.

The secondary plugin file SkillPointLeveledLists.esp is optional. With this optional plugin, Skill Points will appear in some containers around Cyrodiil, such as boss chests. Depending on your mod list, you will very likely need to create a Bashed Patch using Wrye Bash to make the optional leveled list plugin compatible with your other mods.

If you'd like to change the number of Skill Points awarded for different achievements, the number of Skill Points possible to find in containers, or the number of Skill Points it costs to gain a skill level, you can customize these values in Data/ini/SKPSettings.ini using a text editor. You can check the Configuration section for more about this.

When the mod is first installed, a Skill Ring item will be placed into the player's inventory. This ring is what allows you to spend the Skill Points you collect. If you lose track of your Skill Ring, you can get it back by opening the console during gameplay (tilde key) and entering player.additem skpring 1.

Usage

This mod adds two items: Earn Skill Points through special actions or find them around Cyrodiil. Equip your Skill Ring to spend your Skill Points and level up your skills.

First, earn some Skill Points through actions such as quest completion and new location discovery, or find them in special places such as boss chests. Specifically how you are able to earn or find Skill Points depends on how you configure the mod.

Then, once you have some Skill Points, click the Skill Ring in your inventory. The Skill Ring should be added to your inventory by the mod automatically. (If it's missing, you can add it yourself with the console command player.additem skpring 1.)

Equipping the Skill Ring will cause a message box to appear. This menu for spending skill points should be self-explanatory!

In case an explanation is required: If you have Skill Points to spend, then you will be asked by the Skill Ring message box to choose a governing attribute. After you choose an attribute, another message box will appear listing the skills which are governed by that attribute. Here you can allocate your Skill Points to the skills of your choosing. Click on a skill to allocate one level to it, or hold down the shift key and click to undo one level allocation. The message box will show the number of levels you have allocated for each skill. Click "Confirm" to spend your Skill Points and level up your skills, in the amounts you selected. Click "Cancel", and the message box will disappear without any change made to your skill levels or Skill Points.

By default, it costs 2 Skill Points per skill level up. However, the number of points required to spend for each one skill level up can be customized by editing the mod's INI file.

Depending on your configuration, different actions may award different numbers of Skill Points. Here are the Skill Point rewards for special actions when using the default configuration:

• Completing quests: Usually 6 points each (Depends on the quest! See below.)
• Closing Oblivion gates: 4 points each
• Discovering new locations: 1 point each

If you are loading the optional SkillPointLeveledLists.esp plugin, then this enables finding Skill Points in containers such as boss chests. The amount is always random, but the maximum possible value can be changed in the configuration. Here's how it works using the default configuration:

• Searching special containers: Up to 6 points (Randomly determined for each container.)

Here are some other actions that the mod supports giving Skill Point rewards for, but doesn't by default. If you want to receive Skill Point rewards for these actions, then you will have to activate them yourself by editing the INI configuration file:

• Completing the tutorial
• Finding new Nirnroots

The mod supports rewarding higher or lower numbers of Skill Points for quests on an individual basis. For example, the default configuration sets guild expulsion quests and Thieves Guild blood price quests to reward no Skill Points, and for some of the most significant main quests and guild quests to reward higher than usual amounts of Skill Points. You can expand the collapsed view below for a complete list of quest rewards that are different from the default value of 6.

Configuration

It's important to note that configuration is optional. Skill Points comes with reasonably well-balanced default settings. However, there is a great deal of customization available to those who'd like to balance the numbers for themselves.

The Skill Points mod can be configured by editing the INI file Data/ini/SKPSettings.ini, which contains these configuration values:

• SKPSettings.tutorialCompletionPoints: Default 0 - The number of points given to the player after finishing the tutorial. (Or, more specifically, given the first time the player is found to be in an exterior cell.) Although this setting defaults to 0, you can change this setting if you'd like to start the game with some immediate skill level bonuses.
• SKPSettings.questCompletionPoints: Default 6 - The number of points awarded to the player for every completed quest, except for the tutorial quest which is customized separately using the tutorialCompletionPoints setting.
• SKPSettings.locationDiscoveryPoints: Default 1 - The number of points awarded to the player for every newly discovered location.
• SKPSettings.nirnrootPoints: Default 0 - The number of points awarded to the player for each newly found Nirnroot.
• SKPSettings.closedGatePoints: Default 4 - The number of points awarded to the player for each Oblivion gate they close.
• SKPSettings.leveledListPointsMax: Default 6 - The greatest possible number of points to be found in any one leveled list. This means that it's the highest value that you will ever find in any one container, such as boss chests. Note that the value is randomized for every chest, so this isn't an exact setting. Also be aware that the optional SkillPointLeveledLists.esp plugin is required for this setting to take effect.
• SKPSettings.skillLevelPointsCost: Default 2 - The number of points required per skill level up. For example, a cost of 2 means that you can gain one skill level per 2 Skill Point items in your inventory.
• SKPSettings.skillLevelMax: Default 100 - This is a compatibility setting, and it represents the skill level limit after which Skill Points can no longer be spent on a given skill. If you are using a mod which raises or lowers the skill level cap from vanilla Oblivion's cap of 100, then you should change this INI setting. Alternatively, you could use this setting to impose a cap on how far a character is allowed to progress only with Skill Points.

Individualized Skill Point reward amounts for quests can be configured in the INI file as well. You can use this to change rewards to your preference, or to improve compatibility with other mods. The format for a quest reward multiplier is like so:

set SKPSettings.questRef to MS49 ; The Battle for Castle Kvatch
set SKPSettings.questMultiplier to 2.0
SetStage SKPSettings 10

In this example, MS49 is the Editor ID of the quest. For vanilla quests, you can easily find the Editor ID of a quest by searching for it on the UESP wiki. The Editor ID is shown near the top of the page for Oblivion quests. The text The Battle for Castle Kvatch preceded by a semicolon is a comment giving the name of the quest. The number 2.0 in this example is a multiplier. To determine the quest's Skill Point reward, SKPSettings.questCompletionPoints is multiplied by this value. (You can set the multiplier to 0 if you want a quest to reward no skill points at all.)

The rest of the example is crucial formatting that tells Oblivion what to do with the information.

You can add as many multipliers as you like, and the order they are in doesn't matter. However, when adding new multipliers based on this example template, you should not change anything other than the multiplier number, the quest name, and the quest Editor ID. Also, it is important that the three lines as shown in the example stay together without having other lines in between them.

Compatibility

If making use of this mod's optional leveled list plugin, a Bashed Patch will be necessary to resolve conflicts with any other mods that modify the same lists.

If using another mod which changes the skill level cap, the SKPSettings.skillLevelMax INI setting should normally be changed to whatever the new level cap is.

If using another mod which adds new character skills, it will not be possible to level those skills using Skill Points. If a mod changes the governing attributes of existing skills, this change will not be reflected in the Skill Ring UI, which will continue to categorize skills under their original vanilla attributes.

If using another mod which adds or modifies quests, you may want to edit the quest reward multiplier section of the INI configuration file to ensure that Skill Points rewards for the quests affected by the mod are of a suitable size.

If you do not have all of the official DLC installed, you should go to the very end of the INI configuration file where quest reward multipliers are defined for quests added by official DLC. Here you should add a semicolon to the beginning of each line in the DLC quests section to comment it out. This will prevent the engine from loading these lines and complaining that the quests named in them do not exist.

Otherwise, this mod has a very light touch. You should not normally have to worry about incompatibility issues, not even with other character progression mods.

Recommended Mods

Skill Diary Redone, which can be used in-game to track attribute bonuses, skill level ups, and other forms of progress toward the next level.

Practical Training, which allows unused training sessions to carry on to the next level up.

Attribute Progression Redesign, which allows unused attribute bonuses to carry on to the next level up. Credit also goes to the mod's author, PistachioRaptor, whose help and guidance were invaluable in figuring out how to make this, my first Oblivion mod.